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Delta, Airlines Face Challenge Slowing Union Drives
Delta Air Lines Inc. and U.S. air carriers face a steeper challenge in blocking union campaigns after the National Mediation Board eased rules for organizing. An airline trade group said it will sue to block the change.
Airline employees starting on June 10 can form a union with majority approval from those who vote under the rule released today. Previous organizing efforts required majority support from all workers in a class and counted unreturned ballots as “no” votes.
Workers will have “clear choices,” the board wrote in the rule to be published in tomorrow’s Federal Register. “The board will no longer presume that the failure or refusal of an eligible employee to vote is a vote against representation.”
The rule is a victory for transportation labor unions after President Barack Obama took office and gave the board a 2-1 Democratic majority. The AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation, requested the change Sept. 2.
“The National Mediation Board does not have legal authority to implement this rule, one that undoubtedly will lead to more labor discord,” the Washington-based Air Transport Association said in a statement. The group has “no choice but to seek judicial review.”
The board, which referees relations between labor and management at railroad and airline companies under the 1926 Railway Labor Act, proposed changing the rule in November.
Delta, JetBlue, AirTran
Delta, the major airline with the fewest workers in labor groups, may be affected because unions for flight attendants and baggage-and-ramp workers have said they want to organize almost 35,000 employees at the Atlanta-based carrier. Delta is disappointed and will join ATA’s lawsuit, said Gina Laughlin, a spokeswoman for Delta.
JetBlue Airways Corp., based in New York, has large employee groups without a labor union, and AirTran Holdings Inc. said in December its customer service, ramp and reservation agents rejected union representation.
While rail-union elections also are affected, about 90 percent of employees at the largest U.S. railroads are already represented by unions, the Association of American Railroads has said.
The ruling represents “a new era of democracy,” the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA said in a statement. “For far too long, flight attendants and other aviation and railway employees have faced significant obstacles in their quest for collective bargaining rights.”
Board Appointees
The change was proposed after the Obama administration named former flight-attendants’ union leader Linda Puchala to the board in May 2009, replacing a Republican and former Northwest Airlines lobbyist and giving Democrats a majority. The other Democrat on the board, Harry Hoglander, is a former pilot- union official.
The change is “the most dramatic policy shift in the history of the agency,” Chairman Elizabeth Dougherty, the panel’s lone Republican, said in her dissent. “The majority argues -- incredibly -- that every board over the last 60 years has simply been wrong.”
Labor representatives speaking at a board hearing in December said the change would make elections fairer, because the existing balloting system counts workers who don’t vote as being opposed to forming a union.
A “decades-long injustice was finally rectified,” Edward Wytkind, president of the AFL-CIO’s transportation trades department, said on a conference call. A lawsuit by the airlines doesn’t put “a cloud” over the decision, he said. “We’re going to assume the rule will take effect.”
UAL, FedEx
Besides Delta, carriers challeging the rule include UAL Corp.’s United Airlines, FedEx Corp., JetBlue, AirTran, Alaska Air Group Inc. and Hawaiian Holdings Inc., the Washington-based trade group said in the statement.
AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, Southwest Airlines Co., Continental Airlines Inc., US Airways Group Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc. weren’t listed as part of the lawsuit.
To contact the reporters on this story: John Hughes in Washington at jhughes5@bloomberg.net.
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