50+1 percent of what? If I read things correctly they need OVER 50 % of the total membership to VOTE. The winner of the vote will be who a majority of the members vote for. They don't have to have over 50% of the votes, just a majority of the votes. Am I not reading things correctly?
The way an election works under the NMB is that you have to have at least 50% of the total mambership (including all furloughed members with recall, which at us fleet service is 4 years) vote and then you have to have at least one more vote to tip the scale. Then if you can get through that hurdle the union with the most votes out of the total number voting wins.
So to simplify this before the election even goes off the company already has 50% of the votes, so let's say America West has 1500 fleet workers and US 2500, that's a total of 4000. Now lets say US has 3000 members on furlough with recall.The company only needs to give the furloughed members last known address and all of these ex-members with recall come back at $9.00 an hour, so how many do you think will even care or just vote NO UNION just for spite. That now brings the total number of eligible voters up to 7000.
Now you will need 3500 + 1 just to vote for one of the unions to even keep from being DE-Certified.
So as you can see with only 4000 active members, chances are at least 500 won't even vote, which is a vote for NO-UNION and that will be it, we all lost.
If you don't think it can happen, just go back and do the research on the US-Piedmont election when we lost the Teamsters union and were DE-CERTIFIED.
Basically the election is already set in the companies favor and the chances of actually winning are very slim. So any of you who are thinking we need to give both unions a chance better think twice. Don't think Doug Parker won't be ruthless once we are DE-CERTIFIED. We at US Airways who went through all of this can show you all of the company propaganda that was given to us by the company.Things like, Key cains with quarters in them and a phone number to call guarenteeing they would not take anything off of us or cut our pay, vhs tapes teeling us to trust them, mailings weekly. But in the end it only took about 8 weeks after DE-Certification and what we had left of our contract was about nothing.
They took money, jobs(express work was in our scope) our holidays, and I mean all of them we got no holiday pay for almost 10 years(until we voted the IAM in) vacation time.
By the time they were done there wasn't much left.
So any of you who think we should re-vote to be fair better think again, we all at US Airways know first hand what will happen.