Senate Panel Passes FAA Reauthorization without Changing Courier Labor Rules
This story appears in the July 27 print edition of Transport Topics.
A Senate committee last week approved a bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration without a provision that would make it easier for some employees at FedEx Corp. to unionize.
In May, the House passed its version of the bill with a provision that placed express package carrier employees under the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Act, rather than the Railway Labor Act. Currently, employees and drivers at FedEx’s package unit — FedEx Express — are covered under the RLA, while workers at its chief rival UPS Inc. are classified under the NLRA.
Under the NLRA, unions may organize companies terminal by terminal. The RLA generally covers railroads and airlines and requires that companies be organized all at once, generally making it more difficult for the unions to succeed.
The issue has been a point of contention between UPS and FedEx, ranked Nos. 1 and 2 on the Transport Topics 100 listing of the largest for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada.
“Our position is that, as a matter of equality and fairness, that employees doing the same job should be covered by the same labor law,” UPS spokesman Malcolm Berkley told Transport Topics, “and FedEx drivers are the only drivers in the industry covered by a law that is designed for airlines and railroads when they do the same exact job as every driver in the country.”
FedEx did not return calls seeking comment but has in the past called the provision a “bailout” for UPS.
The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee approved its bill on July 21 without the provision by a voice vote.
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), chairman of the Commerce panel’s aviation subcommittee, who added that he and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the full committee, “felt very strongly we need to get a bill done. We need to get to a conference, and there are a half-dozen things that are very controversial. You can load this up with all those issues, but then you’ll never get a bill through the Senate.”
While Dorgan listed several items dealing with the FAA specifically, he did not mention the express package carriers provision, just saying that “there are a couple of other [items] as well.”
Berkley said he was unsure whether the Senate would address the bill.
“I don’t know that we have that expectation, but we’re certainly confident that there are people who understand our position on the issue,” he said. “The process will work itself it out, and at some point, we’ll have to reconcile the House and Senate versions of this bill.”
Jim Berard, spokesman for House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-Minn.), told TT the provision “is something he’s been supporting for a long time, so he’s certainly not going to give up easily on it.”
