Mediation Board Proposes Changes to Democratize Union Elections at Airlines, Rail
Bt a 2-to-1 margin, the National Mediation Board (NMB) says it’s time to bring democracy and majority rule to rail and airline workers voting whether to join a union.
The NMB today proposed changes to airline and rail election rules to mirror the rules that govern every other democratic election—the outcome is decided by the side that receives the majority of votes cast. Under current rules, every worker who does not cast a vote is counted as a vote against forming a union.
Edward Wytkind, president of the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department (TTD), says the NMB’s proposed changes are “fair and sensible.”
The deck is currently stacked against airline and railroad workers. The NMB is proposing new rules that would finally permit airline and rail workers to vote for unions under the same standards found everywhere else in our system of democracy. With this change, never again will workers in these industries seeking to form a union be thwarted by such un-democratic rules.
Recovery Bill ‘Good News for the Economy’
Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an economic recovery package to create and save up to 4 million jobs and stabilize the nation’s rapidly tumbling economy. The bill passed without a single Republican vote, despite President Barack Obama’s White House and Capitol Hill meetings with Republican lawmakers in an outreach effort to set a more bipartisan tone in Washington.
The Republicans offered their vision of a recovery plan—tax cuts, mostly for Big Business.
On the House floor during debate on the bill, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, described Republican opposition to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act this way:
I must say that I truly admire the courage of my friends on the other side of the aisle. In the middle of the worst economic downturn that any of us can remember, our parents told us about the Depression, an unprecedented and accelerating job loss all across the American economy in every sector, our friends on the other side of the aisle ask us just for one last time to do what they’ve been doing the last eight years; to just one more time give the tax cuts to the richest people in the country; to just one more time dive into the tank of fiscal irresponsibility.
