Chicago, IL
The collective bargaining rights of airline workers face unprecedented legislative attacks by the nation's major air carriers. Led by American, FedEx and Delta, the industry has mounted a campaign to enact legislation that would impose "baseball style" arbitration in airline negotiations, thereby replacing a delicately balanced labor law system with one that tilts heavily in management's favor.
The AFL-CIO deplores the nation's airlines' pursuit of this hostile legislative initiative and will work to defeat it if it surfaces in any form in the House or Senate.
Last fall, the airline industry secured a multi-billion dollar taxpayer bail?out in response to the staggering losses arising from the September 11th attacks. Then, it abandoned the effort by its employees and unions to win extended unemployment and health care assistance for workers laid-off after September 11th, including tens of thousands of airline employees. Now, at the very moment airlines are counting on their front-line employees to help restore air travelers' shaken confidence in the safety and security of air transportation, they are using taxpayers' dollars to finance an expensive "community-based" legislative campaign designed to destroy these workers' collective bargaining rights. Incredibly, the roster of high-priced lobbyists working on this supposed "grassroots" initiative includes former members of Congress and high-ranking government officials from both sides of the aisle.
The legislation being promoted by the airlines would create an odd and impractical statutory scheme that permits the Transportation Secretary to impose, under vague standards and in defiance of existing labor law, compulsory arbitration in airline labor-management bargaining disputes. This new system would somehow exist on a parallel track with the Railway Labor Act - the statute governing labor-management relations in this industry - which would continue to dictate the terms of bargaining and mediation under the auspices of the independent National Mediation Board. Worst of all, the legislation would give a Cabinet Secretary unbridled authority to trample on a bargaining process that for six decades has been overseen by an independent agency whose Senate?confirmed members are deliberately housed outside of the Cabinet in order to maintain objectivity and impartiality.
The Administration has already demonstrated a predisposition against allowing airline bargaining to function without governmental interference and a willingness to use federal loan guarantees as a handle to force changes that disadvantage workers.
Requiring mandatory arbitration of airline labor-management disputes, overseen by the Secretary of Transportation, would only exacerbate the threats to collective bargaining for airline employees.
The AFL-CIO calls on Congress to reject this power grab by the nation's airline CEOs. Collective bargaining rights for airline industry employees should be enhanced, not further diluted. The labor movement will mobilize to defeat this legislative assault.