A running line of argument in the multi-million dollar FedEx PR and lobbying campaign against an amendment to the FAA reauthorization bill which would place FedEx Express drivers under the same federal labor law as every other delivery driver in the nation is that its chief competitor, UPS, did something “sneaky” to get the amendment in the bill.
For example, the FedEx “Brown Bailout” website claims that “UPS lobbyists have buried a short 230-word legislative bailout deep inside the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2009 currently before Congress.”
Or as FedEx spokesman Maury Lane put it in a March 23rd statement: “To their credit, the Senate has rejected efforts to include an ill-conceived 230-word bailout provision inserted by UPS lobbyists into the House bill that would change how FedEx Express has been regulated since its founding 38-years ago.”
FedEx supporters have regularly repeated this FedEx claim. As long ago as last June the Washington Times opined in opposition to the amendment because, they wrote, it “contains an almost hidden provision — a mere 230 words — that would hobble FedEx Express.”
Or as blogger Jennifer Kaplan put it in The Inspired Economist back in March: “UPS lobbyists have buried a short 230-word legislative ‘bailout’ deep inside the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2009 currently before Congress.”
And here’s how the Wall Street Journal put it in an op/ed just this week: “House Transportation Chairman James Oberstar (D., Big Labor) last year slipped 230 words into a spending bill that would make it easier for the Teamsters to unionize FedEx.”
Indeed, this may well be the best-known 230-word “hidden provision” in all of Washington, DC.
Nevertheless, it seems FedEx doth protest too much about “slipping” things into FAA reauthorization bills.
According to columnist Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post yesterday, “In 1996, as the Senate considered reauthorization for the Federal Aviation Administration, a few words were slipped in (our emphasis) allowing FedEx alone (our emphasis) to be classed as an express carrier under the jurisdiction of the RLA.”
So in reality, UPS isn’t trying to get a “bailout” from the Senate with an amendment slipped into the FAA bill this year; it’s simply trying to remove the FedEx bailout slipped into the FAA bill back in 1996. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.