Elections

The results from last weeks national elections seem to be very favorable to Labor. We made our voices heard at the ballot box saying the current situation is not acceptable. What do we do now ? It's not enough to sit back and watch the people we put into office do their thing we must make sure they continue to hear our voice. There are many issues that impact our members and we need to insure our elected officials are working for us. The first issue we need to act on is foreign maintenance of domestic aircraft. This practice is not in the public spotlight and will need our diligence to insure it is addressed. Rule changes by the first Bush administration made it easier to ship our work overseas and 9/11 opened the floodgates to the practice. The maintenance being accomplished by these foreign providers does not receive the same regulatory scrutiny as work done here. We need to make sure that foreign maintenance is accomplished to the same standards that we live by every day. These include the same level of oversight by the FAA, the same security and personnel standards and the same environmental and labor standards. We've been working on this for years and have come close to getting it done. Now it's time to make it happen.

We must also address our health care problem. We are currently paying about twenty percent of our heath care costs out of pocket. This cost is a big financial burden on our members and it gets bigger every year. The company is paying eighty percent of our health care bill which is about $12,000 a year. This puts our labor at about a six dollar per hour cost disadvantage compared to competitors who do not provide health care before anything else is factored in. The issue is to big and important to sit back and let things happen. We have to push for health care reform that insures coverage, controls costs and levels the playing field.

Our defined benefit pension needs to be protected. The trend in America is for companies to abandon these pensions and put the burden of saving for retirement on workers. Experts say and we know that it is very hard if not imposable to save enough for retirement if the only help you receive is a small tax break. We have avoided this through contract negotiations but once again it puts our labor at a competitive disadvantage. We plan on staying in the defined benefit club however our membership will be more secure if it is less exclusive.

The key to protecting and improving our economic and social well being is organization. We need more Union density in our industry and our country. We've put up with government hostility and public indifference to organized labor for to long. The Employee Free Choice Act will be a big step in the right direction. It's up to us to hold the people we put into public office accountable. Nothing will happen by itself we have to make it happen.