While most people have heard of organized labor’s high profile attempt to make union organizing easier under the National Labor Relations Act (which covers most private sector workers) by effectively doing away with secret ballot elections, their effort to ease union organizing rules for those in the airline and railroad industries (covered by the Railway Labor Act) has largely gone unnoticed.

In spite of railroads and airlines being two of the three most unionized industries in the United States (64.5% and 45.1% union density, respectively, as compared with 7.6% in the private sector overall), the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department (TTD) sent a letter on September 2, 2009, to the National Mediation Board (NMB) asking them to overhaul their system of union elections to make organizing easier, by adopting similar rules for union elections that currently exist under the NLRA.

What is noticeably absent from the TTD’s request, however, is any method of also making union decertification easier or more in line with the NLRA. The NMB has notoriously disfavored decertification of labor unions and has made it extremely difficult for workers who do not support a union to call for an election. For example, even if a majority of employees submitted a petition asking to remove a union and return to non-union status, the NMB would not honor that petition.  Adopting the TTD’s proposal would make it easier to organize in the railroad and airline industries, but would do nothing to ease union decertification rules for those same workers.

To ensure that this double standard has not gone unnoticed by the NMB, yesterday the Chamber sent a letter to the Board asking for it to reject the TTD’s proposal. Nevertheless, should the NMB move forward and consider easing union organizing rules in this heavily organized industry, the Chamber’s letter requests that the NMB also adopt a similar measure to ensure that employees can have a decertification election upon presentation of signatures of 35% of the employees. As summed up in the letter:

To require any other standard would be to impair and inhibit employee freedom of choice in representation matters.  If adoption of the TTD’s proposal were deemed to be appropriate, then the same logic compels adoption of our proposal as well.  The Chamber urges the Board to consolidate our request with TTD’s, if considered, conduct hearings, and seek the views of all interested parties on the issues presented. 

Read the full letter here.