The Department of Labor has filed a federal lawsuit against a staff association funded by the largest regional air carrier in the United States, which provides services for American Airlines, Delta, and United Airlines.
Despite efforts by the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) to unionize crew members at Skywest Airlines, the Utah-based carrier does not have a formal flight attendant union and instead funds a representative body called the Skywest Inflight Association.
The Skywest Inflight Association was established in 1999 and was, until recently, labeled a ‘local labor organization’ rather than a ‘national labor organization.’ It is the only body allowed to negotiate with Skywest management over various issues like pay, conditions, and internal policies.
That distinction is important because, as the DOL claims in its recently filed lawsuit, the rules over when a local labor organization must hold elections differ from those of a national labor organization.
A local labor organization is required to hold elections every three years, whereas a national labor organization is only required to hold elections every five years.
The DOL lawsuit alleges that the Skywest Inflight Association failed to hold its elections within the three-year timeframe, and when it was warned that it was potentially breaking the law, the ‘union’ was quickly relabeled as a ‘national’ labor organization for Skywest’s 4,100 flight attendants.
When the Skywest Inflight Association finally got around to running its latest elections in August 2023, however, it’s alleged that irregularities beset the process and that two flight attendants who put themselves up for election were wrongly disqualified for ‘disloyalty.’
The ‘chaotic’ election had to be ruled invalid when the vendor of the third-party voting platform used by SIA told the airline that the process had potentially been ‘tampered with.’
The DOL lawsuit alleges that a former executive officer of the union and potentially several other members had managed to cast ballots for at least 300 members – something that came to light when members went to vote only to find that their ballots had already been cast.
When SIA rerun the election, it disqualified two nominees because they had allegedly shown disloyalty to the Skywest Inflight Association over their support for the Association of Flight Attendants.
The Department of Labor is now calling on a Utah court to declare the rerun election void and force the airline to hold another election with the whole process supervised by the DOL.
The lawsuit is concurrent with a separate lawsuit brought against SIA by the Association of Flight Attendants, which has alleged that the airline illegally sacked two veteran crew members for exposing serious security flaws during the August 2023 election.
According to the lawsuit, one of the terminated crew members discovered that anyone could access the names and voting credentials of flight attendants on the ballot website. The allegations came to light after some flight attendants complained that they weren’t able to vote because their ballot had already been cast.
The crew member recorded a video of how fraudulent votes on the ballot website could be cast and posted it on social media. The following day, the election was canceled and the voting website shut down.
A month later, however, the crew member and another flight attendant who had been a vocal supporter of the AFAs unionization drive were terminated for alleged misconduct.
A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the DOL had filed a lawsuit against Skywest Airlines. The lawsuit has only been filed against the Skywest Inflight Association.
Next we will have the US Senate interfering in student council.
Already happened with the current US Congress. The grandstanding US Senate “interference” with university administrators was meant to do just that to student councils and other student organizations: put pressure on university administrators so as to get them to crack down on unpopular speech/expression and academic freedom by students (and faculty). And as usual, it’s easy to toss around labels such as “they are disloyal/bad actors/subversive/____, _____” and so on.
The US Department of Labor is tasked to make sure that federal labor laws and regulations are observed and to enforce them when parties subject to their jurisdiction fail to do so. This kind of oversight of workplace-related practices is exactly what US DOL should be doing since they have responsibilities for protecting the unionization/union-participation rights of employees in the US.