Transportation Workers Face ‘Undemocratic Process’ When Seeking Union

by Mike Hall, Dec 15, 2009

If a worker in the airline or rail industry doesn’t cast a ballot in a union election, under the rules of the Railway Labor Act (RLA) that nonaction is automatically counted as a “no” vote.

Last week, the National Mediation Board (NMB) held a hearing on a proposed new rule that would stop the automatic “veto by silence” and permit a majority of workers who actually vote to decide the union election.

Flight attendants, union officials and labor experts explain the need for change in a new video report from DELTAAFA, the flight attendants group that is working to win a voice for the Delta Air Lines and former Northwest Airlines flight attendants who make up the merged Delta.

Under current rules, says Delta flight attendant Marianne Bicksler, “Everyone starts out as a “no” vote, from the very get-go.”

People who don’t vote, who aren’t very interested, who have no opinion one way or another—they don’t really care—those are all counted as “no” votes. And if you didn’t receive your ballot, it’s lost in the mail, that’s a “no” vote.

Patricia Friend, president of the Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA), says non-democratic voting rules that govern airline and rail elections are

just not consistent with the kind of democracy we practice any other place in out lives, or in this country.

Railway and airline employers typically try to suppress the vote and keep workers from the polls in RLA elections, says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University.

It’s an undemocratic process. It’s a process where the employer is able to keep voters away and where workers are denied their democratic rights….It affects every single worker in the railway industry, the airline industry, who tries to organize.

Danny Valdez, a Delta flight attendant, says the proposed change gives airline workers

a very fair, a very democratic, level playing field to seek representation.  If we vote for a union, that’s fine. We won fair and square. If we lose, it’s because we lost fair and square

Click here to view the entire video and here, here and here to read Bicksler’s testimony before the NMB hearing and that of Northwest Airlines attendants Janette Rook and Samuel Berry. Click here to read the testimony of AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department President Edward Wytkind.

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