My understanding is that the railway labor isn't under the RLA, why are we?
Incorrect. Rail employees are still covered by the RLA, just like us. There are some slight variations for rail employees, such as regional adjustment boards for grievances instead of company-specific adjustment boards, but the Section 6 process is the same for them as it is for us.
The current use of the RLA is anti labor, which you admit above, yet there is no push to get out of it. Why don't you just accept a simple reality that the RLA isn't getting any better an we need to move on as other labor groups have?
I'm all for moving on to something better, but that isn't a possibility right now. Whatever would replace it from the current Congress would be worse, not better. I'm not too fond of the idea of baseball style arbitration.
Contracts should expire, not be amended
Disagree. Contracts expiring would not work in our favor. It's a function of the complexity of our contracts. When it comes to UFCW workers at Kroger, for example, having a contract expire works great. Their contracts are very simple, so if they go on strike tonight, they can get a settlement done in a matter of minutes and be back at work tomorrow. Doesn't work that way for us. Because of the complexity of our agreements, it takes months just to negotiate single sections like Scheduling. It doesn't take all of that time just because management is stonewalling, it takes all of that time legitimately because of how complicated it is to make changes to those sorts of sections. Making changes to something like Retirement is even worse, because of all the legal implications that go along with it.
So, what happens when you put an expiration date on it is that management uses the expiration date to their advantage. They know that the employees can't last a strike long enough to actually negotiate changes to those complicated sections, so they stonewall on everything until the expiration date. They just don't even talk about it. Flat out refuse. Then, the expiration date comes along and they throw down some modest pay raise proposals, and say take it or leave it, no changes to the work rules sections. You know that if you go on strike, you can't possibly stay on strike for the six months it would take to bargain the changes to all of the various work rule sections (Scheduling, Retirement, Benefits, etc.), so you've been backed into a corner. You have no choice but to take the pay increases, but get no improvements to anything else.
We've already seen the effect of expiration dates. Management did exactly what I described above during the bankruptcy process at the majors last decade. The 1113(c) process contains a deadline, so management would waste time talking about nothing but money for the entire time, leaving all of the work rule issues for the end. The deadline would hit, and then management would demand all of the work rule changes and say that there wasn't time to bargain over them, because the deadline was fast approaching. Either take their changes or deal with the judge.
Expiration dates are good for management, bad for labor. That's not the solution. What would be a better solution would be what they have in several European countries: the ability for short-term job actions with proper notice. You may have seen airline workers in various European countries announce a month in advance that if a contract isn't resolved by a set date, then they are going to go on a 24 hour strike.
They control the deadline, and
they control the length of the job action. This allows for economic harm to be inflicted on the company without having to deal with a long-term strike at the end of an expiration period, which we all know that labor can't endure.
