Here is a good explanation of the mediation process. It’s also why we can now expect as multi year process as the NMB is not likely to devote any real assets toward our mediation.
Once the union and the company have entered mediation, a professional NMB mediator is assigned to handle the case. The federal mediator has statutory authority of the negotiation process and gains full control of the bargaining schedule. The NMB has a staff of about a dozen professional mediators, two of which are senior mediators, to handle all their rail and airline cases, and there are typically 90-110 mediation cases open at any given time. NMB mediators have decades of experience, some times as much as 20 years of contract work as a union official or a company labor relations executive before joining the NMB. Several are former pilots or flight attendants with previous MEC experience.
With only a dozen mediators to work on hundreds of rail and airline employee groups, the NMB places a high premium on only assigning mediators to a frequent bargaining schedule when it believes the union and management are close to what it calls the “zone of reasonableness” – in plain terms, when the two sides have moved away from their opening positions, have finished bargaining on the majority of their contract and are closer to compromise on the remaining items. Usually a mediator will not be assigned until the parties have only a few open items left to bargain; of course, these are often also the most critical, time-intensive contract sections like pay, benefits and scope.