Originally Posted by
flyguy81
SWA is the largest airline in terms of domestic travel in the US. If we shut down it would drastically affect commerce.
The RLA will not allow a strike where that would occur. The last strike allowed was Spirit when they had less than 1,000 pilots. We have nearly 10,000.
We can vote to strike. We’ll never get the chance. Management knows it. Your only shot at a quick CBA is to hold more leverage than the other side. The massive turnout during the pickets apparently worked in 2016. Food for thought....
This quote needs to be addressed. It is held by a large number of pilots within our pilot group.
To begin with, as I believe Proximity already pointed out, the RLA does not prohibit a strike. The Supreme Court said this about that idea:
This is very close to a judgment that there shall be no strikes in the transportation business, a judgment which Congress rejected in drafting the Railway Labor Act. True, the Act was designed to maximize settlements and minimize strikes, but Congress stopped short of imposing compulsory arbitration, the most obvious technique to insure the settlement of disputes and to prevent strikes.
The RLA attempts to strike a balance between the right of labor to to its own economic agency, the right of industry to the same, and the national interest in a transportation infrastructure on which the economy and flow of commerce depends.
One court put it like this:
In our complex society, metropolitan areas in particular might suffer a calamity if rail service for freight or for passengers were stopped. Food and other critical supplies might be dangerously curtailed; vital services might be impaired; whole metropolitan communities might be paralyzed.
To balance those three interests, the RLA lays out a multi-step process that compels labor and industry to engage each other in the hope that an interruption of commerce can be avoided.
The Act specifies no time limit on mediation, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that the RLA's mediation procedures are purposely long and drawn out.
For the procedures of the Act are purposely long and drawn out, based on the hope that reason and practical considerations will provide in time an agreement that resolves the dispute.
...the statutory scheme retains throughout the traditional voluntary processes of negotiation, mediation, voluntary arbitration, and conciliation. Every facility for bringing about agreement is provided and pressures for mobilizing public opinion are applied. The parties are required to submit to the successive procedures designed to induce agreement. But compulsions go only to insure that those procedures are exhausted before resort can be had to self-help. No authority is empowered to decide the dispute and no such power is intended, unless the parties themselves agree to arbitration
In other words, one of the big ideas behind the RLA is to wear one or both sides out so that they will capitulate thereby avoiding an interruption of commerce. Court opinions on RLA cases are full of similar statements. Notice that those statements do not say anything like, "...based on the hope that labor will get tired of mediation and concede to industry". It doesn't say that because that is not the objective.
Instead, the Supreme Court has made statements like this:
Implicit in the statutory scheme, however, is the ultimate right of the disputants to resort to self-help— the inevitable alternative in a statutory scheme which deliberately denies the final power to compel arbitration.
Here is what the US federal appeals court had to say about the right to self help:
Indeed, the unquestioned right to resort to self-help is the inevitable alternative in a statutory scheme which deliberately denies the final power to compel arbitration. That the occasions for resort to this raw power will be rare under a system which hedges in disputes by elaborate negotiations, mediation and Presidential fact finding machinery, does not deny either the existence of the power, or the present policy determination that, awesome as is its prospect, it is the only way to preserve the last vestige of free contracts, freely made.
Since the right surely exists, the law must accommodate itself to the exercise of this power in a way that will make it effectual. Anything less either temporizes with the so-far-determined policy against compulsory arbitration, or puts the full weight of law on the side of the employees by making it impossible for the Railroad to carry on save on the terms and conditions imposed by the organized employees who now refuse to perform as agreed.
To be sure, the law gives much power to organized labor. It discourages, on every hand, industrial and railroad labor strike, walkouts, lockouts, and strikes. But when the machinery of industrial peace fails, the policy in all national labor legislation is to let loose the full economic power of each. On the side of labor, it is the cherished right to strike. On management, the right to operate, or at least the right to try to operate.
The rights of self-help owned by both union and management have been deliberately preserved by Congress, albeit held in temporary abeyance. They survive, available for use when the statutory procedures to promote agreement are exhausted.
Notice a key word in these statements: "right". Engaging in self help is a right recognized by the highest court in the land. If the NMB attempted to strip labor - or industry - of that right, it would be illegal and subject to challenge. Most pilots seem to not understand that when mediation drags on for several years that what is occurring is exactly what is supposed to be occurring. It's all part of the RLA game.
The NMB draws out mediation because that's what the RLA is designed to do. It's not because they want to see labor fail. If pilots understood this, they'd exhibit the patience that is required to win the RLA game.
None of us are required to like that the RLA forces drawn-out mediations. But it's the way it is. The RLA comprises the rules of the game.
Complaining about the RLA, refusing to learn the RLA beyond the level of a first-grader, and declining to accept it as reality would be like a professional football team complaining that they don't like the NFL's rules, not reading the NFL rule book beyond the one-page introduction, and walking off the field after 30 minutes of play because, in their opinion, games should only last 30 minutes instead of the 60 minutes defined by the league.
What would happen if your favorite NFL team didn't come back to play after half-time? They would lose, right? Even if they were ahead by 60 points at half-time, if they refused to come back out, the other team would score touchdown after touchdown unopposed. Welcome to airline pilot negotiations at many airlines in the early 21st century.
We could make more analogies between playing football and why pilot groups don't file for mediation and why they're terrified of a strike authorization vote and so on, but you get the idea.
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On a separate, related note, most pilots also seem to not be aware that NMB mediators can, do, and are encouraged to lie and tell half-truths to one or both parties in an effort to obtain a settlement.
Here is what the courts have had to say about that:
The NMB is free to "experiment with any mediation device that can fairly be said to be designed to settle a dispute without a strike and does not independently offend other laws."
Successful mediators often liberally use blarney (hoomalimali in Hawaiian) as one of their mediation tools. The Chairman's statement may well have been a ploy. By inquiring as to the true meaning of such a statement we could well undermine its entire purpose by forcing the Board to admit it was a tactic to spur negotiations.
It is the nature of disputes in mediation for one party to feel squeezed.
The Board may let a case sit as a mediation tactic, and it may tell parties that it will let a case sit. Congress chose this necessarily protracted means for resolving railroad labor disputes. As the Board explained, Wallace's remarks are:
simply the proper responses of a mediator who does not want to give one of the parties an indication that it no longer needs to negotiate in good faith. Parties who are told mediation may soon end have all the more reason, if they are dissatisfied with the mediation process, to harden their position and not participate in good faith.
So, when the mediator threatens to, for example, put us "on ice forever" or at least, nearly "forever", they are lying. Threats like that are lies. They are merely tactics to spur negotiations. Plain and simple. NMB mediators do not have the legal authority to actually follow through on threats like that. They absolutely have the legal authority, upheld by multiple court rulings, to claim that they will do that or any number of other things. The bottom line is that mediators can say almost anything, as long as it "does not independently offend other laws" to try to compel one side or the other to cave.
The mediator, like the President with a PEB, does have a limited ability to control the clock. While the President gets only 60 days, the NMB via the mediator gets several years. But the mediator's power over the clock is not unlimited. It eventually runs out no matter how much the mediator threatens. The same goes for other lies the mediator might tell like a claimed ability to limit discussions to only certain sections of the CBA. The mediator doesn't have the authority to actually enforce something like that.
Unfortunately, in almost all cases, the party with the better ability to withstand the pressure is NOT labor (pilots) because we mind-bogglingly refuse to learn or play the game that the RLA has created for both labor and management. Because of our stubborn refusal to accept reality and insistence on believing myths like big ol' government is colluding with industry to get us, we lose bargaining strength advantage and engage in self-defeating behaviors like refusing to take the field again after half-time because we're tired or ideologically opposed to the idea that the NFL can make the rules or simply don't like to take the time to read the rule book.
The truth is that the more educated and informed side wins. Management may not like that the game lasts 60 minutes any more than we do, but they accept that fact and the play the game according to that reality.