Rep. Gingrey to introduce bill ripping into Obama Labor Department’s airline unionization plans

Republican Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey plans to introduce a bill that will restore the Department of Labor’s union election rules for specialized industries, like airline workers, to what they were before President Barack Obama took office.

Obama’s political appointees to the DOL’s National Mediation Board lifted a longstanding requirement that mandated more than half of those who would be unionized to vote in favor of a union. Now, under Obama’s new rules, a specialized company or part of a company can be unionized by a majority of only those who show up to vote.

The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) has tried to unionize Delta Airlines flight attendants several times in the past decade. The AFA even got unionization to a vote three times but failed on each attempt because the unions couldn’t get enough workers to vote in favor of unionizing. The Obama administration was able to ease those union election accountability requirements, in part, by placing two political appointees to the National Mediation Board: Linda Puchala, the former president of a flight attendants’ union similar to the AFA, and Harry Hoglander, an active member of the Airline Pilots Association union.

Gingrey’s staff told The Daily Caller that the National Mediation Board isn’t fair and clearly has a pro-union agenda because two of its three non-elected members, who make decisions with enormous impact throughout several industries, have advocated on behalf of unions before. The one minority member of the board, Elizabeth Dougherty, a President George W. Bush appointee, was excluded from the meetings during which Hoglander and Puchala discussed changing the rules. Also, Gingrey’s staff said the board’s new rules instituted after Obama took office don’t include a union decertification process, a formal way to get rid of a union if employees no longer want one.

Rick Manning from Americans for Limited Government said he thinks the new election rules are another example of an attempt by Obama’s DOL to abet union growth.

“It is unconscionable to change election rules that have stood our nation well for more than 70 years, merely to increase the probability that Big Labor will succeed in unionizing a targeted company,” Manning said in an e-mail to TheDC.

Even with the loosened unionization election requirements, though, the AFA was not able to unionize Delta’s employees in an election a few months ago. The AFA is saying Delta interfered in the unionization elections and has filed complaints against the company for having encouraged its workers to vote, which the AFA says is a biased maneuver to prevent unionization. But Delta says it had to tell workers about the rule change because many of them would otherwise believe the rules remained the same from the last election, when abstaining from voting meant voting “no.”

If that dispute gets a hearing, it will be none other than the National Mediation Board, the same group of pro-union political appointees that lifted the union election restrictions in the first place, that hears it. The International Association of Machinists (IAM), which tried and failed to unionize several other groups of Delta employees, joined on to the AFA’s complaints.