Mica files bill to 'restore fairness' to transportation union elections

House Transportation chief Chairman Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) fired the latest salvo in the fight over labor rules for transportation workers Thursday, introducing a bill to make it easier to disband unions.

Last year, the National Mediation Board changed the election rules for unions covered by the Railway Labor Act to ensure that absentee votes were not counted as votes against forming an union.

Mica, who is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has led an unsuccessful-thus-far effort to reverse the change in a funding bill for the Federal Aviation Administration.

He said Thursday that he was filing standalone legislation to apply the same standard to union decertification elections. 

"This bill simply ensures that changes recently made by the National Mediation Board making it easier for airline and railway workers to unionize also apply to disbanding a union,” Mica said in a statement released by his office. 

Democrats have strongly objected to Mica's effort to undo the NMB's 2010 change to union rules, accusing him of forcing a shutdown of the FAA earlier this year because provision.

Union's have argued the NMB's rule changes made labor elections "more democratic," but Mica has called the new guidelines unfair.

“When the NMB changed 75 years of precedent to lower the threshold for unionization, it left in place the much more difficult process to leave a union," he said Thursday. "By ensuring equal standards for both processes, this legislation restores fairness to how unions are formed and decertified at our airlines and railways.”

Mica said his bill has more than 100 co-sponsors.

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