No Help from the House for Air Traffic Controllers

by Mike Hall, Jun 8, 2006

Thanks to a White House veto threat and the Bush administration’s use of misinformation from two extreme-right groups, the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday failed to pass a bill that would have told the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to go back to the bargaining table with the nation’s air traffic controllers.

While the bill won a large bipartisan majority (271-148), the vote fell short of the two-thirds majority required by the House rules under which the bill was considered.

On June 5, the FAA imposed a contract that cuts pay for current and future controllers by as much as 30 percent, reduces pensions and, according to some aviation experts, could prompt more than 4,000 of the current 14,000 controller workforce to retire, exacerbating an already critical controller shortage.

The bill (H.R. 5449), offered by Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-Ohio), would have required the FAA to lift the imposed contract and resume bargaining with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA).

In April, despite NATCA’s offer of more than $1.4 billion in pay and benefit cuts, the FAA cut off talks and declared an impasse. Under federal law, 60 days later the agency was allowed to impose the terms of its final offer.

Before the vote, not only did the Bush administration say it would veto the bill, but NATCA says Bush’s Department of Transportation circulated letters to representatives from two far-right groups—Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the American Conservative Union—that contained inaccurate and misleading information about the LaTourette bill.

The letters also threatened lawmakers with a “negative score” in their groups’ congressional rankings if they voted in favor of requiring to FAA to continue bargaining with the controllers, NATCA says.

Referring to FAA administrator Marion Blakey, who pulled the agency from the bargaining table, NATCA President John Carr said:

The nation’s air traffic controllers deserve better than a boss who, rather then sit down and discuss the issues with them, actively seeks out shrill voices to attack its own workforce.

After the vote, LaTourette said:

This was about fairness in negotiations and safety in our skies….It’s regrettable that there was such a concerted effort to distort the facts about air traffic controllers’ salaries, and I can’t recall another bill that was so willfully smeared. 

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