In a Washington Times editorial last month, the paper inked the following:
“As passed by the House, the (FAA reauthorization) bill contains a small provision that could hobble FedEx Express, the airborne division of delivery specialist FedEx. FedEx Express does about 85 percent of its business via air, but the new provision would make it abide – for the first time ever – by labor laws meant for ground transportation.”
To believe this nonsense you’d have to believe FedEx Express has hired Santa Claus to fly from house to house and business to business, dropping off express delivery packages after landing his sleigh on your roof.
All kidding aside, I’m sure you’ve personally had FedEx Express deliver packages to your own office or home. Were they delivered by airplane…or by van? Did a Boeing 727 land on your street, have the pilot jump out of the cockpit, run your package up to the door, and then take off again for the next stop? Of course not.
While 85 percent of FedEx packages may be flown from one city to another, 100 percent of them are then picked up from airports and actually delivered to customers by drivers on the ground.
And while it’s certainly appropriate to classify the pilots who transport packages from one city to another under the law intended for air transportation, it’s absurd to suggest that drivers who drive to the airport, pick up the packages, and then deliver them to directly to your doorstep are “airline” employees.
This is just another example of the disinformation propaganda FedEx is pushing to retain an unintentional loophole in the nation’s labor laws which allows its drivers to be treated under one set of labor laws while every other express delivery driver in the nation is covered under a different set of labor laws.
Either Congress should level the playing field to allow all express delivery companies to classify their employees under the air transportation labor law or it should close the FedEx Express loophole and move that company’s express delivery drivers under the same ground transportation law as everyone else. A driver is a driver, not a pilot. And this corporate welfare benefit for FedEx Express has gone on long enough.