A flight attendants’ union is claiming Utah-based SkyWest Airlines illegally fired two of its members, and is demanding their reinstatement. The airline says it was protecting its other employees.
Shane Price and Tresa Grange were already recognized leaders of an effort to organize with a union, outside of SkyWest’s flight attendant union, SkyWest Inflight Association (SIA), when Price said he “stumbled upon” the voting credentials of his fellow flight attendants. His colleagues’ personal information, including unique voting codes, was on an unprotected website for anybody to see if they knew where to look, he said. (On Monday, SIA’s website was down, listed as “under construction.”)
“The website that SIA created had all of that information available to the public,” Price said. “It wasn’t even password-protected.”
What Price found confirmed his previous suspicions, he said, that SIA elections weren’t secure. He showed the information to Grange.
Price made a video documenting what he found, and how he found it. He and Grange posted the video to a private SIA Facebook group. It was further proof, Grange said, that SIA could not be trusted to represent them, and they needed an “independent, legally recognized union.”
That was in August. Grange and Price were both fired Sept. 13. SkyWest, according to a statement from a company spokesperson, had to hold them accountable for “admitted hacking, conspiring to impersonate multiple flight attendants, and then publicly disclosing personal employee data for more than 4,000 employees.”
The spokesperson said, “these actions violated company policy and the law” — though they did not say whether the company had made any reports to law enforcement.
The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), the AFL-CIO-affiliated flight attendant union backing SkyWest employees’ organizing drive and vying to represent them, said the information was already publicly available and vulnerable — and Price and Grange just exposed the vulnerability.
“The whistleblowers identified that SkyWest flight attendants’ personal information was exposed to anyone online and could be vulnerable to manipulation,” said Taylor Garland, a spokesperson for AFA.
In a letter sent to SkyWest’s legal department last week, AFA said Grange and Price were illegally fired as retaliation for union organizing. AFA, in its letter, demands the airline rehire them both.
“Nowhere is it more apparent that SkyWest management controls SIA,” the letter said, “than terminating Flight Attendants over activity stemming from their desire to act on behalf of their peers to identify grossly inadequate voting procedures with their purported ‘representative’ and address grave concerns over whether these procedures accurately reflect the will of the Flight Attendants.”
AFA’s letter claims the firings violated the Railway Labor Act, which regulates collective bargaining for railway and airline labor unions and employers. The rule was adopted in 1926 to prevent large disruptions in rail-based commerce, and defines pathways by which disputes should be settled to avoid a strike.
It’s the same rule that prevented railroad workers from striking last year and instead gave Congress the power to step in and issue new contracts.
AFA said SkyWest’s move to fire Price and Grange violates the rule, because the allegations are directly related to union activity.
“It’s against the law for the company to have any role in internal union activity,” Garland said.
Grange and Price said that, because the information they exposed concerns SIA and its voting procedures, the union should have been the one to respond, not SkyWest management.
“Shane and I would not be here if we had exactly what we’re fighting for,” Grange added. “If SIA claimed to be what they are, we would have had protections.”
Grange said she has long questioned SIA’s ability to fairly represent her and her fellow flight attendants. She was an SIA representative for four years, she said, and left with the impression that SIA was not an independent organizing entity, but an “extension of in-flight management.”
“We all understand that SIA and [SkyWest] management is one and the same,” she said.
A spokesperson for SkyWest called the retaliation claims “outlandish” and said the letter is an act of “grandstanding.” Price and Grange were not fired because of their union organizing, the spokesperson said, but for compromising personal data of thousands of SkyWest employees.
“SkyWest holds every employee to the highest standards of professionalism and does not tolerate this type of behavior from any employee, regardless of their affiliations,” the spokesperson’s statement said.
Grange and Price were fired shortly after more than 200 SkyWest airport employees were scheduled to be let go or reassigned. The airline filed a ”warn notice” in July, and said at the time that SkyWest was “transitioning” its Salt Lake City airport operations and customer service jobs to Delta, one of its partners.
SkyWest’s spokesperson said Friday that an “overwhelming majority” of the affected employees have moved over to Delta or transferred to other positions at SkyWest.
Grange and Price are both appealing their terminations. The demand letter gave SkyWest until last Friday to respond, and Garland said AFA is “reviewing” the airline’s response.
SkyWest said it “stands firm in our responsibility to protect the personal, confidential employee data of our more than 13,000 people.”
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.
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