Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers v. Burlington Northern Railroad Company

In this appeal, we are called on to decide whether the Railway Labor Act (“RLA”) bars Burlington Northern from unilaterally implementing a sniffer dog program designed to restrict alcohol and narcotics use by on-duty railroad workers. The program requires engineers, before embarking on trains from certain yards, to submit their grips to a trained dog to sniff for the presence of controlled substances. Although I concur in the result arrived at by Judge Alarcon’s opinion, I get there by a somewhat different route. First of all, I deal more extensively with the management perogative issued…