Union labels Mica labor bill a 'smokescreen' on FAA funding

A bill introduced by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) to make it easier to disband unions is a "smokescreen" distracting from an authorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration, a Washington union is arguing.

The Washington-based Communication Workers Association (CWA), which is the parent group for the union for flight attendants, sharply criticized Mica's bill to make it easier for transportation employees to vote to decertify unions, saying workers already had the right to do that. 

Mica, who is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the bill would mirror rules adopted last year by the National Mediation Board to ensure that absentee votes were not counted as votes against forming an union.

The CWA said the bill is another effort by Mica, who led an unsuccessful effort to reverse the NMB change in a funding bill for the FAA, to attack labor unions.

"Workers have a right to decertify a union under current law," CWA communications director Candice Johnson said in a statement.

"John Mica is not only blurring that simple fact with his latest smokescreen, he’s relying on that and stalling tactics to change the focus from where it belongs — on the fact that he and Delta Air Lines remain insistent on blocking the benefits of the FAA reauthorization bill over unrelated union provisions,” Johnson continued.

In a statement announcing the filing of the bill, Mica painted a different picture, saying, "[T]his 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.

"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. "By ensuring equal standards for both processes, this legislation restores fairness to how unions are formed and decertified at our airlines and railways.”

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