Unions and the Obama administration pressed Congress Wednesday to reauthorize funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, urging lawmakers to end a five-day partisan stalemate that has put thousands of FAA employees on furlough, shut down dozens of airport construction projects nationwide and allowed airlines to pocket millions of dollars in uncollected ticket fees.
But House Republicans and Senate Democrats remained deadlocked over legislation that would keep the FAA operating over the long term, despite airline and construction workers lighting up the Capitol switchboard ? and scathing criticism from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Neither side budged on a key sticking point in a pending reauthorization bill: a GOP-backed provision that makes it more difficult for airline industry employees to organize unions.
Continue Reading?Because some Republicans have refused to allow another clean extension of the FAA?s programs, we are inflicting real pain on real people,? said Sen. Jay Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) , chair of the Science, Commerce and Transportation Committee, pointing to roughly 4,000 FAA employees and thousands more construction workers who are temporarily jobless.
?People are suffering, small businesses are hurting, and we are losing jobs,? he said, noting that the FAA can?t collect federal airline ticket fees because of the shutdown. ?Even consumers are losing out on an airline ticket tax holiday as the majority of the airline industry has greedily chosen to pocket those revenues rather than reducing ticket prices. The damage we are doing to our aviation system is real, and if we fail to act in a timely manner, it may be so devastating as to be irreversible.?
But his Republican colleague, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, said idled FAA employees and airport construction workers have no one to blame but Democrats and ?President Obama?s big union allies.? The bill that?s stuck in the Senate, he said, simply undoes a ?heavy-handed? ruling by the National Mediation Board that lowered the bar for workplaces to form unions.
Long-term funding authority for the FAA, passed during the Bush administration, expired in 2007, and Congress has bickered over new legislation ever since. Lawmakers have kept the agency running through a series of 20 short-term extension bills, but Congress missed the latest deadline, forcing the FAA to send some ?non-essential? employees home and halt upgrade projects at airports from coast to coast.
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