FAA bill puts FedEx workers under labor law:
Obama Administration Moves Toward New Contract With Air Traffic Controllers; FAA Nominee Babbitt Pledges Cooperation
WASHINGTON (PAI)--Even before former Airline Pilots Association President J. Randolph “Randy” Babbitt takes the cockpit seat as Federal Aviation Administration chief, one main problem he faces -- a new union contract for the agency’s controllers -- is finally on its way to a solution after an 8-year war.
That’s because Democratic President Barack Obama’s Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood, named a 3-person panel of mediators on May 19. He told them to get to work to forge a new contract between the FAA and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Sessions started immediately, NATCA spokesman Doug Church said.
The mediators, LaHood said, are to come up with “binding resolution of unsolved issues” between the FAA and NATCA. That guarantees a contract, LaHood added.
Meanwhile, Babbitt’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee the same day went smoothly. Babbitt, an independent aviation safety consultant since his 1990-98 service as ALPA chief, said he has earned the trust of both labor and management in the airline industry.
Babbitt wants to settle the pilots’ pact, too. “Within the FAA, we need to regain internal labor stability, mutual trust and build on the ‘can do’ spirit of the entire FAA workforce. We need to work to ensure the FAA’s accountability and credibility in delivery of its goals, budgetary compliance and safety standards,” he told the senators.
Babbitt and LaHood, on Obama’s behalf, aren’t the only officeholders who want to bring the long-running dispute to an end. On May 21, the House passed a new FAA authorization bill that urges both sides back to bargaining, makes controllers partners in developing new aircraft control systems and sets up a procedure to prevent future disputes between the agency and its workforce, NATCA spokesman Doug Church said.
The Teamsters also got a boost from the FAA bill. It repeals a 10-year-old provision, inserted in aviation law by past GOP Congresses, which let FedEx classify all its workers -- including its ground truck drivers -- as “airline workers.”
That “airline worker” provision, which the FAA bill dumps, makes it harder for the Teamsters, or anyone else, to organize FedEx. Airline workers and railroad workers are under the Railway Labor Act (RLA), not regular federal labor law. That RLA act requires unions to organize not just one worksite, but all of them, at a particular company.
And to win under RLA, the unions must win 50% + 1 of votes from all members of a bargaining unit, not just a majority of those voting. Any uncast votes are “no”s.
The developments cheered NATCA, which represents 14,000 controllers and other FAA workers -- and which has seen 2,000 veteran controllers retire ever since the anti-worker GOP Bush regime’s FAA unilaterally declared an impasse in bargaining in Sept. 2007 and imposed its contract on the union. That pact did not solve bad working conditions, cut the pay of the most-veteran controllers and froze the pay of the rest.
“LaHood picked (former FAA administrator) Jane Garvey” to chair the mediation panel, Church elaborated. “That indicates it’s obviously one of the priorities of the president to get this solved.” To give the legislation an additional push, 400 NATCA controllers, in D.C. the week of May 18 for the union’s legislative conference, discussed the contract and controllers’ role in the FAA, when the delegates hit Capitol Hill.
“He kept his commitments to us,” Church said of Obama, who promised the union’s legislative conference several years ago he would make ending the dispute with the FAA a high priority. As a senator, it was one of his top pieces of