According to a recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration has delivered a body blow to Corporate America, specifically the airline and railway industries, which do not need any further impediments to their respective economic woes.

Both of those industries have their labor relations policies governed by The National Mediation Board (NMB), and the Board has maintained a consistent policy for the last seventy-five years.  

Now, however, under a proposed new rule, the board plans to tilt the playing field in favor of organized labor. To wit: In order to obtain certification, a union will no longer need to win the approval of a majority of workers. Rather than obtain a majority of workers, a union will only have to win a majority of workers who choose to vote in a union election. That works well for unions, because only a minority of workers usually votes. Getting a majority of that minority to vote for a union will be easy. Imagine, if only 100 workers out of a total workforce of 1,000 agree to vote: the union would need only 51 votes to unionize 1,000 workers! The winning team will always be the union.

This dramatic change has been the result of President Obama appointing the former president of a pilots’ union and the former president of the Association of Flight Attendants to the NMB. It is comparable to a single football team using its own players as the sole referees in all of its games. Would such a team ever lose a game?

This change will invite numerous strikes, which will cripple the nation’s transportation system. We are now light years away from the time when President Reagan fired air traffic controllers, members of The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) for going on strike. Their strike was against the national interest. President Reagan’s actions led to the demise of PATCO and to a robust airline industry that benefitted all travellers. It was a milestone in the history of labor relations, a milestone that will not  - unfortunately –  be repeated anytime soon.

The safety of airline passengers is of paramount importance not just to passengers, but also to airlines. No one wants to fly on the planes of an airline whose pilots may be negligent when it comes to passenger safety.

When FAA regulators revoked the licenses of the two pilots who flew Northwest Flight 188 more than 100 miles beyond its destination and who had not responded to air traffic controllers, the flying public breathed a sigh of relief.

Yet, officials of the Airline Pilots Association, which represents more than 50,000 pilots, complained that the FAA acted too quickly and disregarded voluntary safety reporting programs.

Blatant acts of negligence that could possibly endanger the lives of airline passengers cannot be tolerated, even if those acts are voluntarily reported.

Had that plane collided with another aircraft or experienced some other deadly catastrophe, the airline would have been held financially responsible and there would have been millions of dollars in law suits.

The FAA did the right thing, and the pilots’ union should understand that. Unfortunately, unions too often raise picayune issues that are of concern to their members, but fail to address more important issues that affect millions of people.