Contacted Voters, Passed Out Fliers In Airports Accusing Republicans Of Blocking Long-Term Funding Over Labor Issues

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) said it planned to contact 300,000 households in 19 Republican-held House districts, as well as handing out fliers in airports on the busiest travel day of the year, in an effort to blame those Republican lawmakers for the lack of a long-term FAA funding measure. The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) operates under the CWA umbrella.

In a statement, the CWA said the reason there was no multi-year authorization for the FAA was due to "a group of ideologically extreme Republican Members of Congress, who along with Delta Air Lines remain unwilling to remove a contentious and unrelated provision about union elections from the FAA legislation. As a result, their obsession with union busting threatens to derail the benefits of the long-term FAA legislation for the foreseeable future," the statement said.

The Hill reports that the union, as well as some House Democrats, say House Transportation Committee chair John Mica (R-FL) and like-minded Republicans are largely to blame for the lack of a long-term FAA bill, and they say the Chairman is doing the bidding of Delta Airlines to make it harder for that carrier's workers to unionize.

Delta has traditionally been a non-union carrier based in Georgia, a right-to-work state. Serious efforts to unionize the carrier began when Delta bought Northwest, which is heavily unionized. Northwest workers have been attempting to expand their union representation to the entire workforce since the carriers merged, but Delta workers have consistently rejected unionization.

Senate Commerce Committee chair John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-WV) has joined the chorus blaming House Republicans for doing the bidding of Delta. "We cannot continue on this disastrous path, but we do stand on the precipice of losing another FAA reauthorization bill this year," Rockefeller said, speaking this week to airline industry officials at the Aero Club in Washington, D.C. "I do not understand how this fixation with one airline can be seen as paramount (such) that the House would shut down the FAA to get its way," he said.

Congress faces a January 31 deadline for passing a long-term funding mechanism for the FAA. If it does not, and a 23rd continuing resolution is not adopted, the agency could face another shutdown like the one which occurred in July.

FMI: www.cwa-union.org