[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12278-12279]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          FAA REAUTHORIZATION

  Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I meant to be here earlier when Senator 
Rockefeller was on the floor speaking about the situation with the 
Federal Aviation Administration. However, I was unavoidably detained 
while chairing a hearing on the HELP Committee that just adjourned a 
few minutes ago. I wanted to be here to discuss with Senator 
Rockefeller the sad situation we are facing right now with the shutdown 
of the Federal Aviation Administration.
  We are now in the sixth day of the defunding of the Federal Aviation 
Administration. What that means is that right now we have some 4,000 
FAA workers who are furloughed, and tens of thousands of people out of 
work in airport construction jobs--infrastructure. These are people who 
are not working for the government; they are working for private 
contractors who have a contract with FAA for runway construction, 
putting in lights, safety measures, things like that. So tens of 
thousands of people are out of work in the private sector because of 
the cutoff of FAA reimbursements to these businesses around the 
country.
  It is costing the Federal Government about $25 million in tax revenue 
a day--$25 million a day in lost revenue. That money would be plowed 
back into the economy to pay for aviation operations and for the people 
who are working out there on construction jobs building runways, 
lighting systems, and things like that.
  At a time when we have so many people who are unemployed in our 
country--and the underemployment rate is really somewhere between 16 
and 18 percent--with over 23 million people in America out of work, 
what do the Republicans do? They hold up funding for the Federal 
Aviation Administration, which puts 4,000 more FAA people on furlough 
and tens of thousands of people working on construction jobs around the 
country out of work. Why would the Republican Members of this Congress 
do such a thing? Because they want to overturn a National Mediation 
Board decision that was handed down a little over a year ago to align 
the election procedures under the National Railway Labor Act with the 
provisions that have always been in place under the National Labor 
Relations Act.
  Let me explain that. Under the National Labor Relations Act, which 
has been in existence since the late 1930s, if you have an election to 
see whether workers want to organize a union, you count the yeas and 
you count the nays of those who vote. If the yeas are more than the 
nays, the workers form a union. If the nays are more than the yeas, 
they don't form a union. Under the Railway Labor Act, an odd thing took 
place. Under that, it said that if you have an election for a union, 
you count the yeas, you count the nays, and then all those people who 
didn't vote, you put them in the ``nay'' column. Interesting. If you 
don't vote, you are an automatic no.
  What the National Mediation Board did a year ago was realign this 
using rulemaking procedures. They said that from now on you would only 
count the yeas and the nays. You would not assign to one side or the 
other those who didn't vote. To most of us, that just seems to make 
plain old common sense. After all, any election for your local school 
board--and we know the turnout is pretty low; school board elections 
usually turn out maybe 20 percent of the electorate, maybe less than 
that. Yet I submit there is probably no more important election in 
America today than school board elections. I will not get into that 
right now. What if we said: In all these school board elections, take 
the yeas, and then all the people who didn't vote, they are a no.
  What if we did that in Senate races? That strikes home to people 
around here. Say a Senator is running for reelection, and if you are 
lucky, you get a 60-percent turnout of voters. That means the people 
who don't vote are considered a ``no'' vote on the incumbent. Is that 
what we want to see? If you don't vote, that is a ``no'' vote on your 
reelection. Most people would think that is inherently unfair. It is 
inherently unfair.
  The same is true in elections on whether workers want to form a 
union. There are a lot of reasons people don't vote in an election. 
Maybe they are sick and they can't go vote. Maybe they can't make up 
their mind one way or the other. Maybe they said: Well, I see this 
side, and I see that side, and I cannot make up my mind, so I am just 
not going to vote. Some people just say: I don't care which side wins; 
I am disinterested in this election. Thankfully, in America, we don't 
have somebody forcing somebody to vote. So it makes common sense that 
if you don't vote, you should not be counted on one side or the other.
  The National Mediation Board put this rule in place. They went 
through all the hearings, the comment period, and all the stuff 
necessary to pass the rule. Then it was brought up in the Senate within 
the last year under a procedure called the Congressional Review Act, 
wherein there is an expedited procedure for the Senate to take up and 
vote on a regulation as to whether we want to overturn it. It is an 
expedited procedure, an up-or-down vote. That was brought up here, and, 
as the chairman of the committee that has jurisdiction over labor, I 
debated it with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. It was a 
fairly good debate, I thought, and we voted. The Senate voted not to 
overturn that regulation. Well, you would think that would be the end 
of it. No, you would be wrong.
  What does that have to do with the FAA? Because the Republicans in 
the House and some in the Senate are saying they are not going to let 
this FAA reauthorization bill get through unless and until we overturn 
the decision--this rule of the National Mediation Board which basically 
says that if you don't vote in the election, you are not counted on one 
side or the other. They are holding the FAA hostage--4,000 workers 
furloughed, tens of thousands in airport construction out of work, $25 
million a day being lost in revenue that would be taken in so we could 
put these people back to work. It is all because they want to make it 
harder for workers to form a union.
  Think about it this way. We are going to have a Presidential election 
next year. Let's say all the people who don't vote would be tallied as 
a ``no'' vote for the incumbent President, assuming he runs for 
reelection. Some of my Republican friends would probably like that, and 
I understand that. Do you think the American people would think that is 
fair, that if you don't vote, you are counted as a ``no'' vote?
  A Federal district court--they took this to court--also rejected a 
legal

[[Page 12279]]

challenge to these new rules, finding that the National Mediation Board 
was acting well within its legal authority in modernizing the election.
  We see this time and time again. It is happening now in this 
Congress. Whenever we try to make things more fair or to use a 
legitimate procedure to address something that I think most people 
would think would be unfair; that is, counting somebody who didn't vote 
as a ``no'' vote--when we do that, Republicans always try to find an 
end run to try to undo that.
  We are down to about 10 percent of our labor force that is now 
unionized. My friends on the other side will not be happy until there 
are no more unions in America. They will not be happy until 
unionization is less than 1 percent, and then only a company-sponsored 
union, not an independent union.
  Right now, Republicans are voting to change the law in the middle of 
a trial as a special favor to the Boeing company. Boeing was accused of 
retaliating against its workers for going on strike.
  As I have pointed out in numerous talks on the Senate floor, there is 
a judicial process that has been used by both labor and management for 
more than 70 years to settle disputes. That process has been to go to 
the NLRB--and management has done it, as well as labor--to find out if 
a certain thing was wrong or if a union has overstepped its bounds or 
if management has overstepped its bounds. The NLRB tries to mediate and 
get the two sides to agree, but if they can't, a process is set in 
motion whereby the General Counsel--who, by the way, was a career 
person, not a political appointee, as some have said--then begins an 
investigation to see whether the facts as presented warrant the next 
step, which is bringing the case to an administrative law judge.
  That is what happened in this Boeing case. I have heard all this 
nonsense about how they are trying to take jobs out of South Carolina, 
trying to destroy right-to-work States. That is nonsense. Right now, 
the case is before an administrative law judge to see whether Boeing 
actually retaliated against its employees for their exercising a legal 
right to organize and bargain collectively as a union.
  Did Boeing retaliate against them for doing that? I don't know. My 
Republican friends seem to think they know. But it should go through 
the process before the administrative law judge, and that finding can 
be appealed by either side--management or labor--and it goes to the 
NLRB, and then they make a decision, which could be appealed to the 
Federal appeals court or circuit court. That decision can be appealed 
to the Supreme Court. Yet the Republicans want to interfere in that 
process and make it a political decision as to whether this case should 
go forward. Just as they are wrong to try to change the rules in the 
middle of a case going forward to benefit Boeing, what is happening now 
with the FAA is also wrong. They are trying to interfere in the 
reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration to change a rule 
from the National Mediation Board.
  The other day, one of my colleagues was talking about when are we 
going to stop doing favors for the union bosses or big unions or 
something like that. I never thought the National Mediation Board rule 
was a favor to a union. I always looked upon it as a fair decision, 
regulation, to make it in line with the National Labor Relations Act. 
Why should we have two separate kinds of election procedures for 
forming a union in this country? Take it to the American people. It is 
common sense. I think that most people would say that someone who 
doesn't vote shouldn't be counted as a ``no'' vote? As I said, we don't 
do that in the National Labor Relations Act. We have had this sort of 
anomaly for years. We finally tried to get it straightened out, and 
that is what is costing us these jobs and $25 million a day.
  There is another issue they have brought up, and that is the 
essential air service at a number of small airports. We can debate 
that. We can talk about essential air service to small airports. The 
bill would eliminate it. That is about $16 million a year--$16 million 
a year--that it would save. Clearly, that is not what the Republicans 
care about. Every week--every week--they hold up the FAA 
reauthorization, it is costing the Federal Government some $150 million 
in uncollected taxes to support our airports. So in order to save $16 
million a year, they are willing to cost the government $150 million a 
week. Boy, that is some kind of economics on the part of my Republican 
friends. So strictly from a budget perspective, the House's 
obstructionism is not just absurd, it is grossly counterproductive.
  Again, this is uncalled for, what they are doing, to hold up the FAA 
reauthorization. As I said, we are now going into the sixth day, and it 
is going to have an effect on air travel. It is going to have a 
profound effect on air travel the longer this plays out. So I ask the 
House Republican leadership to get off of this obstructionism--get off 
of this--and let us deal forthrightly on the bill before us--which is 
the FAA reauthorization--and quit trying to overturn this rule of the 
National Mediation Board.
  On essential air service, I think there are probably some compromises 
that can be made. There are some adjustments and modifications that can 
be made. I think that is probably so. We ought to work in good will in 
doing that on the longer term bill. But it is not right to hold up the 
FAA reauthorization right now on either the essential air service 
objections or their trying to overturn the decision of the National 
Mediation Board.
  Again, I want to thank Senator Rockefeller for his leadership on this 
issue and for his vigorous opposition to the House Republicans' effort 
both to eliminate totally essential air service and to try to do a 
backdoor, end run around the National Mediation Board's rule on 
providing for fair elections for those who seek to belong and to form a 
union in the airline or railway industry.
  With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Madam President, let me begin by applauding Senator 
Harkin, my colleague from Iowa, for his comments relative to the FAA 
and the need to put the people who are out of work back to work and to 
get the FAA reauthorization done. It has been way too long.
  We have a number of people who staff the tower that deals with air 
traffic coming into the United States north of Boston. That tower is in 
New Hampshire. We have people out of work. We need to get them back to 
work and we need to see this legislation done and moving forward.

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