Labor/Employment

The Republican presidential hopeful wrote that the NLRB's suit is an "outrageous overreach by the federal government."

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The rules would roll back a decision by a labor board that makes it easier for unions to organize.

The House on Friday morning rejected a controversial amendment to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authorization bill that would have made it easier to form air and rail unions. Failure to pass the amendment will make it much harder to win Senate passage of the FAA bill and sets up a likely veto of the bill even if the Senate were to approve it.

The amendment, from Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), would have allowed a National Mediation Board (NMB) decision from 2010 to stand. That decision allowed unions to be formed based only on the votes of voting workers. Prior to last year's change, non-voting workers were counted as "no" votes.

The FAA bill, H.R. 658, repeals the NMB decision, and LaTourette's amendment would have removed this language from the bill. Earlier this week, the White House warned it would veto the FAA bill unless the labor language was removed.

Only 16 Republicans voted for the LaTourette amendment, which failed in a 206-220 vote.

The big rules change for aviation and railroad workers in the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill does not involve the provisions that union members claim will make it more difficult to organize.
 
Rather, according to a spokesman for the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the big change involves undoing recent rule changes that made the unionization process less inclusive.
 
Justin Harclerode, spokesman for Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), told The Hill that the FAA bill repeals “unilateral action… taken by the three-member National Mediation Board” that changed the union rules last year.
 
“For 75 years, union elections at airlines and railroads had required that a majority of all workers vote in favor of union representation,” Harclerode said in an e-mail. “In 2010, the NMB changed the rules so that union certification would require only a majority of the employees who actually vote in the election.”

The Federal Aviation Administration authorizing bill should be brought back in for a landing because it contains provisions that would make it harder for airline and railroad workers to organize unions, several collective bargaining groups said Tuesday. 

The AFL-CIO's Transportation Trades Department and other industry unions criticizes the FAA bill for changing rules so that those who don’t vote in a union election would be counted as votes against forming a union. They argue such a system would be undemocratic. 

“The crux of what’s going on is fair elections in union elections,” said former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner in a conference call arranged by the AFL-CIO. “There is no excuse to treat union elections (differently) than other elections. If we had an election (in Ohio) where people on the rolls but didn't show were counted as voting for say, the incumbent, I couldn't certify that. People wouldn't trust it.”