Legal — 7

III. The Railway Labor Act & Transportation Industry Issues
Employees in the rail and air industry are covered by the Railway Labor Act (RLA) rather than the National Labor Relations Act. Unlike the NLRA, the RLA did not establish a Board that is designed to consider and resolve all disputes under the Act. Instead, the RLA established a “National Mediation Board” (NMB), which has the limited but important functions of resolving representation disputes and mediating contract disputes. Other disputes arising under the RLA that are not resolved through the grievance-arbitration procedure, called “System Boards of Adjustment” in the airline industry and “Public Law Boards” in the railroad industry, are resolved directly through actions in the federal courts.

The National Mediation Board consists of those members nominated by the President. Currently, there are two Republican members and a Democrat. The Democratic member is Harry Hoglander, a former ALPA member who was chairman of the Master Executive Council at TWA. The Republicans are Edward Fitzmaurice and Read Van de Water.

Since the last convention, the IAM and its air transport and rail districts have struggled mightily to obtain fair contracts for the members in those industries against a tide of legal and political obstacles.Within months of taking office, President Bush declared that there would be no strikes at major airlines during his administration.

At that time, the IAM was trying to negotiate new collective bargaining agreements for nearly 50,000 employees of United Airlines, most of whom had been working under the ESOP agreement since 1994. An agreement was eventually reached for the mechanics and related employees in 2002 after Bush appointed a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to recommend a resolution of the contract dispute.

In the railroad industry, national negotiations with the major rail carriers have dragged on nearly since the last convention without a new agreement. The dispute has been in endless mediation under the NMB auspices, and the IAM’s efforts to obtain a satisfactory resolution or a release for mediation have fallen on deaf ears.

With a Republican administration and a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, the airlines sought to amend the Railway Labor Act (RLA) to require binding “baseball-style” (best offer) arbitration of longstanding disputes. The IAM led the opposition by labor unions to this effort to “reform” the RLA that would have tipped the negotiating balance even more in favor of the carriers.

The “interminable processes” of the Railway Labor Act, which were so carefully crafted to produce stability in the industry, no longer work to help the parties reach acceptable agreements in a reasonable amount of time. Expiration dates have become meaningless and mediation goes on forever. And the concept of equality of bargaining power is nonexistent because workers are denied the only effective weapon they have—the right to self help—something that is absolutely implicit in a statutory scheme that does not compel arbitration. So, the IAM has advocated an activist, participatory role for mediators, one in which they understand that their job is to help the parties reach a successful conclusion within a reasonable time frame, which means a bargaining agreement, not simply the avoidance of a work stoppage.

Listed below are some of the significant decisions involving the IAM issued by the courts and the NMB under the RLA since our last report:

■ When US Airways announced in October 2003 that it would subcontract heavy maintenance of its new Airbus aircraft, the IAM filed a lawsuit to stop the carrier. The IAM obtained a ruling that US Airways’ conduct triggered a “major dispute” under the RLA, and the judge enjoined US Airways from proceeding with subcontracting the IAM work. A divided appeals court later reversed the major dispute finding and sent the case to arbitration. A decision in the arbitration has not been rendered as this report is written.

■ When Northwest Airlines refused to repay its employees for the wage concessions they made between 1993 and 1996, the IAM sued to force the carrier to pay. This case is still in court as this report is written.

■ When a TWA mechanic dues objector was fired because he insisted on paying his agency fee by payroll deduction, even though the carrier could not accommodate that request, he sued both TWA and the IAM. After TWA’s bankruptcy took it out of the case, the IAM successfully defended its actions.

■ After the IAM won an election to represent Aeromexico’s passenger service employees in the U.S., the carrier refused to bargain with the IAM and then announced that it was moving its reservations work to Mexico. The IAM sued and obtained a court order requiring Aeromexico to continue paying its employees whose work had been subcontracted. The IAM later obtained a severance package for those employees.

■ The IAM paved new ground in convincing the NMB to add employees through accretion to the crafts it represents at United Airlines, US Airways, Northwest and Hawaiian. Nearly 2,000 employees obtained IAM representation through the process of these accretion applications over the past four years.