SkyWest Airlines’ in-house labor organization, which is charged with representing the Utah-based airline’s flight attendants in bargaining agreements, can no longer be trusted to manage its elections, the head of the U.S. Department of Labor has alleged in a federal lawsuit.
Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su, in a lawsuit filed Friday, claimed SkyWest Inflight Association (SIA) — the legally recognized labor representative for the airline’s flight attendants — needs a supervisor to oversee its next elections because it has failed to comply with federal law.
In the lawsuit, Su is asking a federal judge to declare the results of SIA’s recent elections invalid and grant the Department of Labor supervision rights over the next round.
SIA has not yet been served, according to the court docket, and an attorney has not yet been assigned to the case in its defense.
As the representative for SkyWest’s flight attendants, SIA tasked with acting as a middleman between flight attendants and airline management to bargain for such things as wages and benefits. Association members vote for executive officers and representatives.
SkyWest flight attendants have accused the association in a separate lawsuit of being a mere extension of management.
“We all understand that SIA and [SkyWest] management is one and the same,” Tresa Grange, a former SkyWest flight attendant, told The Tribune in September.
A group of flight attendants is organizing to unionize with the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, claiming SIA’s elected officers do not represent flight attendants’ best interests. SIA is funded by the airline, not by membership dues — proof, flight attendants have alleged, that it cannot be separated from management.
SIA President Brent Coates said in a statement that complaints made to the Department of Labor, which prompted the federal lawsuit, are “part of a yearslong, stalled attempt to replace SIA as the legal labor representative for SkyWest Flight Attendants.”
“SIA has been in regular communication with the DOL over the course of several months. There are clear disagreements over how SIA is structured under federal law,” Coates said. “Despite these distractions, SIA has delivered to our Members the best Flight Attendant contract in our industry, including the first and only one that provides Boarding Pay (and other benefits) to regional Flight Attendants. We are confident in our position and look forward to responding in court.”
A spokesperson for SkyWest, which is headquartered in St. George, said the airline is not a party in the suit and clarified SIA is a separate entity, though, according to the lawsuit, it is funded by the airline.
Grange and the AFA have also separately sued the airline for violating the Railway Labor Act and firing her and her colleague, both prominent union organizers, as retaliation for organizing. The airline has denied the charges, and claims flight attendants were fired to protect employee privacy. That case is still in federal court.
AFA, in a statement sent Tuesday to The Tribune, said the Department of Labor’s “lawsuit again makes clear the SkyWest Inflight Association is an illegal company union operating at the behest of management and not for Flight Attendants it claims to represent.”
The new lawsuit, filed Friday in Utah U.S. District Court, packs a lot of allegations in its 16-page complaint. It calls into question virtually every step of the association’s recent elections. It also claims SIA tried to reclassify itself in order to evade its legal obligation to host a secret election every three years.
SIA also failed to file two requisite forms and disclosures with the Department of Labor and changed its bylaws in ways that were unclear, contradictory or illegal, according to the complaint.
A key issue, according to the lawsuit, is the way SIA has tried to represent itself, compared to its functional purpose according to the law. An amendment to the association’s bylaws made sometime after July 2023 says that “SIA is the national representative advocating body for all currently employee SkyWest Airlines Flight Attendants, including national industry issues.”
The original bylaws did not include the word “national,” according to the complaint. The addition was intentional, the lawsuit claims — but incorrect.
National labor organizations follow different rules and election schedules than local ones. Where local organizations must hold elections every three years, national ones need only hold elections once every five years. But whether an organization is local or national is a matter of function, not geography, the lawsuit says.
SIA is functionally a local labor organization, the complaint argues, because it “performs day-to-day functions typical of local labor organizations,” including negotiating and enforcing collective bargaining agreements. In amending its bylaws, SIA was attempting to rebrand as a national labor organization “without actually changing its function or purposes.”
“SIA applied the ‘national’ label to itself despite being told by DOL just days before that it could not self-identify as a national labor organization,” the complaint says.
SIA has not consistently held elections every three years, according to the complaint. It has instead adopted an “ad-hoc” election schedule.
Some of the issues raised by the Labor Department’s lawsuit echo allegations former employees made late last year — and for which they lost their jobs.
Grange and Shane Price were fired in September after they published a video to a private SIA Facebook page documenting how they had “stumbled upon” fellow flight attendants’ private information, including unique voting codes, on SIA’s unprotected website. The findings were proof, the flight attendants said, that SIA could not be trusted to represent them and that their votes were not actually secure.
The Department of Labor’s lawsuit claims the voting platform used in the August 2023 election did, in fact, detect a “significant percentage” of suspicious votes. A third-party investigation found a former SIA officer had successfully cast 389 votes using other employees’ voting codes and had tried, but failed, to cast another 114 fraudulent votes.
When SIA held a new election on a “more secure” platform, the lawsuit claims, it failed to effectively communicate a closing date, leaving members in the dark about the deadline by which to cast their votes.
The association also barred two members from running in the new election for “disloyalty,” according to the lawsuit. The members had allegedly “recently and publicly” spoken against SIA and in favor of “a different organization to ostensibly replace SIA.”
Neither member was notified of their “disloyalty” charges ahead of the election, the lawsuit claims, nor did they have a chance to dispute or defend themselves.
“As we have seen, SkyWest management will do whatever they can —including firing longtime workers — to intimidate and attempt to control Flight Attendants,” AFA said in a statement.
Su has asked a judge to declare void the results of the association’s recent elections — including the January 2024 election, the last regularly-held election for executive officers, and any election for a representative whose term has exceeded three years. The lawsuit also asks the court to order SIA to hold a new election under the Department of Labor’s direct supervision and pay for any legal costs associated with the lawsuit.
This story has been updated to include a statement from SIA President Brent Coates.
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.
