A national flight attendants’ union has filed a lawsuit against Utah-based SkyWest Airlines, making good on a promise made last month to take legal action over the firing of two employees — claiming the layoffs were illegal retaliation for union organizing.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Utah by the AFL-CIO-affiliated Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), repeats claims made last month that SkyWest violated the Railway Labor Act by firing Shane Price and Tresa Grange, prominent leaders in a campaign to unionize with AFA.
A spokesperson for SkyWest said last month that Price and Grange were not fired for union organizing, but for compromising personal employee data. The data was employee information that flight attendants use to vote in elections for the SkyWest Inflight Association (SIA), which says it represents more than 4,000 SkyWest flight attendants.
Price and Grange claimed the data was already compromised, publicly available and easily accessible — and they had just exposed that it was insecure.
Price said he “stumbled upon” voting credentials, including unique voting codes, of his fellow flight attendants on an unprotected, public-facing SIA website. (SIA’s website is still “under construction” as of Thursday.) With Grange’s help, Price posted a video to a private Facebook page, documenting what he found, and how he found it, to fellow flight attendants.
Price and Grange were fired Sept. 13. AFA sent a letter to SkyWest on Sept. 19, demanding their reinstatement and threatening legal action if the airline refused. SkyWest’s spokesperson alleged at the time that Price and Grange had “violated company policy and the law,” though the company did not say whether it made any reports to law enforcement.
“We stand firm in our responsibility to protect the personal, confidential employee data of our more than 13,000 people,” the spokesperson said in a statement last month.
The SkyWest spokesperson did not immediately respond Thursday to requests for comment about the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also alleges that SIA violates federal labor laws because it is funded directly by the airline.
“It is also a form of interference, and therefore unlawful, for SkyWest ‘to use the funds of the carrier in maintaining or assisting or contribution to any labor organization, labor representative, or other agency of collective bargaining, or in performing any work therefor,’” the complaint says, citing federal code. “Despite these prohibitions, SkyWest unlawfully uses carrier funds to maintain and operate Defendant SkyWest Inflight Association, which it claims is the representative for its Flight Attendant employees.”
An old handbook for SIA says the association is not a union, but is the only recognized “representative body for the SkyWest Flight Attendants.” Though not a union by name, Price and Grange told The Tribune last month that the association functions like a union — it is a member association in which members vote for board members and compensation packages. But, Grange contends, it works as “an extension of [SkyWest] in-flight management.”
“We all understand that SIA and management is one and the same,” Grange said in an interview in September.
A similar case was brought against SkyWest and its pilots’ association, SAPA, in 2007. A judge in that case determined that “SkyWest’s unlimited funding of SAPA appears, on its face, to violate the RLA,” but denied an injunction request to halt the airline’s funding to the association. The judge did rule, however, that SkyWest had interfered with union organizing by prohibiting pilots from wearing lanyards identifying the union, the Air Line Pilots Association or ALPA, that they wanted to represent them.
In Wednesday’s filing, AFA’s attorneys have requested a jury trial. The union is seeking damages for Price and Grange amounting to lost wages, benefits and “other pecuniary losses,” and is seeking an order to rehire the two flight attendants.
Shannon Sollitt is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.