WASHINGTON, D.C. – Leaders of six AFL-CIO airline unions today urged U.S. Senators to reject airline industry-pushed legislation denying airline workers the right to negotiate on issues such as wages, benefits, and safety by replacing the right to fight for a good contract with a winner-take-all, “baseball style” arbitration process.
Sonny Hall, President of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department and organizer of the Senate letter, was furious at what he termed “outrageous corporate behavior.” According to Hall, the major air carriers, despite receiving billions in federal bail-out money, “don’t miss a day pleading poverty or demanding massive wage and benefit concessions from their workers. Yet they hire the most expensive Washington lobbyists money can buy to advance a bill to decimate airline workers’ rights. This is deeply insulting to workers. The leaders of these big airline corporations ought to be ashamed of their hypocritical behavior.”
The legislation (S. 1327), introduced at the behest of American, FedEx and Delta, would in the unions’ words, “tilt the delicately balanced collective bargaining process in favor of airline management, thereby making it nearly impossible for labor-management disputes to be resolved at the bargaining table.” The labor officials wrote that it would create a “bizarre and unworkable statutory scheme” that permits the Secretary of Transportation to interfere in the private collective bargaining process by imposing binding compulsory arbitration and to block legal strike actions, while at the same time the Railway Labor Act would continue to govern collective bargaining in the airline industry.
The aviation labor leaders questioned the management acumen of the airline CEOs who would attack workers’ rights at a time when “the future of the major airlines rides on the shoulders of the passengers and the workers” as the industry struggles to rebound from the September 11 terrorist attacks. These illogical and counter-productive moves, the union officials said, “publicly call into question the ability of these corporate leaders to lead this industry’s revival,” adding that, “perhaps the time has come for Congress to pay closer attention to the state of executive management in this industry.”
The leaders signing the letter were: Sonny Hall, International President, Transport Workers Union; Patricia Friend, President, Association of Flight Attendants; Duane Woerth, President, Airline Pilots Association; Tom Buffenbarger, International President, and Robert Roach, General Vice President, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; James Hoffa, General President, International Brotherhood of Teamsters; Morton Bahr, International President, Communications Workers of America; and Edward Wytkind, Executive Director, Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO.