Air traffic controllers land in Washington to lobby

One hundred air traffic controllers arrived in Washington Wednesday morning for hastily convened visits to all congressional offices to ask lawmakers to use a mid-September House vote on Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization to overturn an unpopular contract that the agency imposed last fall.

The FAA instituted the new pay and work rules after it declared that negotiations with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association had reached deadlock. Officials used a loophole in the agency's 1996 reauthorization act that allows the FAA administrator to impose the agency's final offer when talks break down. In June 2006, the controllers were able to bring up a bill under a suspension of House rules that would have closed that loophole and forced the agency back to the bargaining table, but it fell eight votes short of the two-thirds majority it needed for passage.

The controllers are now seeking language in a pending reauthorization bill that would require binding arbitration in contract disputes and would make that requirement retroactive to the last contract. They are attempting to link the pay and work rules imposed on them to retirements and recruitment problems at the FAA, as well as to many of the flight delays Americans have experienced this summer.

The version of the reauthorization bill passed at the committee level on the House side already contains the language the controllers want. They are lobbying to ensure the language remains in the measure, which is scheduled for a vote on the House floor Sept. 17.

The Senate version also has passed at the committee level, but with language less desirable to the controllers. That bill (S. 1300) would prevent the FAA from imposing a similar contract in the future, but would leave the current work and pay rules intact.

This means the controllers also are trying to ensure that once the bill reaches conference negotiations, the House language prevails.

"The difference, this year to last year, is that the things NATCA said would happen with the imposed work rules did happen," Tom Monaghan, the legislative representative for New York's terminal radar approach control facility, told Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., in a meeting at the congressman's office. Monaghan said older controllers are choosing to retire rather than live under a new dress code and other workplace rules in the contract, and younger recruits are quitting rather than accepting lower starting salaries.

The controllers say lawmakers, as some of the heaviest users of the aviation system, are sympathetic.

"I see this as a frequent flyer," Israel told the controllers who visited him. "It seems like we've had the same weather in 2007 as we had in 2001, but the delays are astronomically higher . . . . Since I put my life in your hands two times a week, the least I can do is help you with your issues."

Such arguments have helped activists win the support of Republicans usually loath to protect unions' rights.

"We usually have less support on collective bargaining with Republicans, but we have a lot of support on the staffing issue," said Trish Gilbert, a Houston-based air traffic controller who is national chair to the NATCA legislative committee, and who organized this round of Hill visits.

The controllers also are relying, like any other interest group, on personal connections. Toby Hauck, the vice president of the Chicago air route traffic control center, said he maintains an e-mail list on aviation issues for the Illinois congressional delegation and has briefed congressional staff on the modernization of O'Hare International Airport.

But last summer, when he needed to convince then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert to bring up NATCA's bill under a suspension of the rules, Hauck told Hastert, "I show my livestock at your country fair. If I can't get a vacation [because of understaffing], my kids can't go."

Gilbert said she believes that NATCA has enough support in the House to pass the bill with the language to overturn the FAA-imposed contract.

The Senate poses larger challenges, and the bill might get delayed in that chamber for different reasons. Some senators object to other sections of the bill that would change the FAA's funding source from a ticket tax to user fees. Sens. Jay Rockfeller IV, D-W.Va., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety and Security, have said that they will not move the bill if the funding changes are stripped from it.