There was a good editorial in the Wall Street Journal today that analyzed organized labor’s newest plan to make union organizing easier in the airline and railroad industries:

No trucks from Mexico, no new trade agreements, a sweet deal for the United Auto Workers at GM and Chrysler, tariffs on Chinese tires, and now Big Labor has another demand of the Obama Administration: Overturn 75 years of labor policy to sandbag Delta Airlines and unionize transportation workers. Will it get that too?

...The timing here is nakedly opportunistic. Two of Delta's unions—the Association of Flight Attendants and the International Association of Machinists—have elections pending in front of the Mediation Board as a result of last year's Delta acquisition of Northwest Airlines. Northwest was largely unionized but Delta wasn't. The Delta flight attendants tried to unionize last year but lost that election, and now the AFL-CIO wants the White House to stack the deck in their favor. Beyond Delta, the new rules would make it easier to unionize JetBlue, Continental, FedEx and short-line railroads, among others.

...The union says it merely wants an election governed by the same rules that apply to nontransport industries under the National Labor Relations Act. But the Railway Labor Act was written because the government viewed transportation as economically vital, and one of the law's purposes is to avoid damaging strikes. Every Mediation Board since 1934 has upheld the majority rule, on grounds that "certification based upon majority participation promotes harmonious labor relations. A union without majority support cannot be as effective in negotiations as a union selected by a process which assures that a majority of employees desire representation."

In addition to being opportunistic, organized labor’s proposal also creates a double standard. As we noted last week, the proposal does not address the very real difficulty in decertifying a union under the Railway Labor Act if a majority of employees no longer wish to be represented. The Chamber’s letter urging the National Mediation Board to reject organized labor’s proposal, or, at a minimum, to also create appropriate decertification rules, is available here.