With the debt deal solved and Congress noticeably absent from Washington, the FAA short-term extension was passed in a pro forma session of the Senate. The FAA reauthorization, a long-term bill to fund the Federal Aviation Administration through 2015, has been stalled for two years because of a Republican-led initiative to block new labor rules that would make it easier for airline workers to unionize. And while the Senate only agreed to the short-term extension passed by the House because Obama promised to negate the cuts made to the Essential Air Service through executive action, the point I wanted to draw in this article is the unflinching support which Democrats have given to their union friends. They like to blame Republicans for the shutdown, but the FAA would have been extended and 74,000 workers never furloughed had Democrats agreed to either the removal of a wasteful subsidy for rural airports.
In this case, the particular union rule allowed certain airline employees to unionize with 50% of the votes cast in the unionization election. Sounds fair? Well it isn’t. Standard procedure is that unions must acquire over 50% of the employees in a company, not half of those that vote. Say a Pittsburgh company has 10,000 employees, but the union schedules the election for a Monday night during a Steelers game. Only the hardcore union activists show up to vote, and the union gets 100 votes out of the 150 people that show up. Under the old rules, that would mean the union was defeated, because they could not get over half of the employees in the company to approve of making the union their sole negotiator. Under the new rules, the 100 hardcore union activists who voted, 1% of the company, would be enough to force 9,900 people into a union that they didn’t care enough about to vote for.
Would unions use such slimy tactics as subverting an election? Yes they would. The Service Employees International Union field manual for labor organizers encourages its members to knowingly commit felonies, lie about companies to the media, harass corporate executives, and generally hamper the business’s operation until it collapses. Obviously Delta Airlines would rather this not happen, and when they defeated a unionization attempt years ago, the mediation board created the new rule to make unionization easier.
The National Labor Relations Board also thinks that it can tell Boeing where to build its companies, while the actions of its Washington state affiliates have cost the companies billions over the last ten years. Unions aren’t about workers any more, they are about power and money. Power over companies and money from workers. If they were about workers, they would not resist common sense Right to Work laws and paycheck protection laws, both of which allow workers to choose whether they want to belong to a union. But they don’t, because that threatens their bottom line, and their power. So next time you hear a liberal complaining about anti-union policies, remember unions no longer represent workers, they represent themselves and a small percentage of workers (about 7% in the private sector) at the expense of other workers and American businesses that create jobs and wealth.
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