Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co., 20718.

• Decision Date: 06 September 1967
• Docket Number: No. 20718.,20718.
• Citation: 383 F.2d 225
• Parties: BROTHERHOOD OF RAILROAD TRAINMEN, Appellant, v. ATLANTIC COAST LINE RAILROAD COMPANY et al., Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit

383 F.2d 225 (1967)

BROTHERHOOD OF RAILROAD TRAINMEN, Appellant, v. ATLANTIC COAST LINE RAILROAD COMPANY et al., Appellees.

No. 20718.

United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit.

Argued May 15, 1967.

Decided September 6, 1967.

Mr. Milton Kramer, Washington, D. C., with whom Messrs. Martin W. Fingerhut, Washington, D. C., and John H. Haley, Jr., St. Louis, Mo., were on the brief, for appellant.

Mr. Francis M. Shea, Washington, D. C., with whom Mr. Richard T. Conway, Washington, D. C., was on the brief, for appellees.

Messrs. David G. Bress, U. S. Atty., David L. Rose, Walter H. Fleischer and John C. Eldridge, Attorneys, Department of Justice, filed briefs on behalf of the United States as amicus curiae, urging reversal.

Before BASTIAN, Senior Circuit Judge, TAMM and LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judges.

LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judge:

This appeal involves still another phase of the railroad work rules dispute that erupted again in 1959 when the nation's major carriers served notices under Section 6 of the Railway Labor Act, 45 U.S. C. § 156 (1964), to abrogate existing rules regulating the use of conductors and trainmen, or "crew consist," on yard and road crews. We have recently recounted the events that followed this opening round.¹ It suffices here to say that in 1960 the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen (BRT) served counter notices insisting that not less than one conductor and two trainmen be employed on all road and yard crews, negotiations and mediation proved unsuccessful, and only Congressional intervention and provision for compulsory arbitration forestalled a strike in 1963.

The arbitration award of Board 282 apparently failed to achieve one of its purposes, of guiding the way to a general, long range settlement.

In June and July of 1965 the BRT, anticipating the expiration of the arbitration award in January 1966, served identical notices on some eighty carriers embodying the same proposal they had made in 1960. The carriers responded that these notices were premature in insisting on bargaining during the pendency of the arbitration award, but in December 1965, without waiving their prematurity objection, those eighty carriers plus some twenty others served notices on the BRT proposing the same management-discretion rule they suggested in 1959. No genuine conferences had been held on either group of notices when the carriers obtained injunctions prohibiting a strike over their failure to bargain on the union's allegedly premature notices. We recently reversed the grant of this relief in a decision (see note 1), holding that the union's notices were not in law premature.

In the meantime, conferences were taking place on the local properties, and some agreements were reached. The carriers had requested that the BRT acquiesce in their suggestion that if local negotiations bore no fruit, the dispute be referred to "national handling." From the outset the BRT refused to concur in this request. When local conferences broke down on various roads, the services of the National Mediation Board were invoked. The Board ignored a request by the carriers that mass mediation be scheduled, and instead docketed each dispute separately.

In November 1966, appellees, the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, the Boston & Maine Corporation, and the Des Moines Union Railway, sued in the District Court for declaratory and injunctive relief against a possible strike on the grounds that the BRT first, had not participated in good faith negotiations at the local level, and, second, had breached a statutory obligation by refusing the request for national handling. The District Court after a trial rejected the first contention, but granted the relief sought on a finding that the Railway Labor Act authorized the carriers to demand national handling. In the context of this dispute we disagree, and accordingly we reverse.

I Defense of Res Judicata

Before proceeding to the merits, we encounter the BRT's timely assertion that the carriers' prayer for relief was barred by the principle of res judicata, and in particular its manifestation in the doctrine of merger. The essence of this contention is that after the carriers procured their original injunction in January 1966, based on the supposed prematurity of the notices and the absence of any responsibility of the carriers to bargain prior to that time, the carriers filed a motion for supplemental relief in which they sought and obtained a ruling that genuine conferences still had not taken place. The BRT argues that the carriers could then have raised, and therefore were then obliged to raise, any objection to the refusal to go to national handling.

It is a well-settled and virtually axiomatic rule of sound judicial administration that a party having several alternative grounds for relief arising out of a particular transaction does not have the privilege of litigating his theories one at a time, holding one in reserve while he presses another to judgment. According to the complementary principles of bar and merger, whether a party loses or wins relief in his initial action, the judgment embodies all his rights stemming from the transaction involved, and he is foreclosed from later seeking relief on the basis of issues he might have raised in the prior proceeding to support the original claim.

The question in this case, however, is whether the carriers could have and should have raised the national handling problem in their April 1966 motion for supplemental relief. The transcript of the hearing on that motion reveals clearly that the District Court specifically inquired of counsel for the carriers whether he was urging as a violation of the BRT's duty under the Act its refusal to accept national handling. Counsel replied that he was "not urging that at this time." The BRT contends that this indicates that the dispute had materialized sufficiently to oblige the carriers to join this basis for their claim that bona fide conferences were not taking place.

In two recent cases we applied the principle of res judicata to cut off objections made by the BRT in litigations involving other carriers.² But we do not think it appropriate to invoke that principle against the claim of appellee carriers in this case. The carriers' motion for supplemental relief was based on the District Court's reservation of jurisdiction to construe and effectuate its judgment pronouncing the 1965 notices premature. The carriers sought a declaration that genuine conferences had not yet taken place. They did not have an obligation at that time to expand the relief they were seeking, even though the BRT was on record as opposing the demand for national handling, for this demand by the carriers was conditioned on the failure of local conferences, and it was not yet clear that genuine, good faith local negotiations had been tried and exhausted. Added to the lack of ripeness at that time, there is a serious question about the propriety of introducing this issue in a motion for relief at the foot of the earlier decree, which was directed at very different questions. In this circumstance, we decline to dispose of the case on res judicata grounds.

II National Handling and the Railway Labor Act

Coming to the merits, we conclude that the District Court erred in holding...