Union at BIA focus of vote

BANGOR – Federal employees at Bangor International Airport will learn today whether their union will remain intact until they lose their jobs for good next year.

Ballots from Bangor’s flight service station and 57 others nationwide will be counted today, determining whether the employees will remain members of the National Association of Air Traffic Specialists until July 30, 2007, when the station is scheduled to close.

About a dozen employees remain at the Bangor station, half the number that existed before the Federal Aviation Administration announced last year that it would outsource the operation of its flight service stations. Aerospace industry giant Lockheed Martin Corp., which assumed management in October through its $1.9 billion contract with the FAA, now employs the workers.

Lockheed plans to consolidate the stations, which provide support services such as weather updates, route planning and air space information, from the existing 58 down to 20. By installing new automated technology and upgrading facilities, Lockheed expects to increase the network’s efficiency.

Bangor, which serves primarily general aviation, military and corporate pilots, originally was slated to close in April as part of the consolidation. Its remaining employees continue to work on an at-will basis.

No longer among those employees is Dan Holodick, the Bangor workers’ former union representative, who resigned from his position at the station citing safety concerns. Since the outsourcing, only one person works the midnight shift, which could prove dangerous if the worker experiences a crisis, such as a medical emergency, he said Thursday.

“One person in the building is an unsafe situation,” Holodick said, adding that the building is always locked.

The staffing is in accordance with labor laws, and in some flight service stations, a specialist might receive only four calls during the midnight shift, Dan Courain, vice president of flight services for Lockheed, said Thursday.

Also of concern to Holodick are the FAA’s newly instituted performance goals for workers, an incentive system that sets response times for filing flight plans, answering pilot calls and other duties. If the goals are met, Lockheed gets a bonus of up to $10 million a year from the FAA for the last nine years of its contract.

The time frames limit employees’ ability to set priorities for duties, Holodick said. For example, a specialist risks failing the response time goal if he chooses to handle an urgent airport closing over a pilot’s request for a weather briefing, he said.

“It’s taken away from the whole purpose of what [the] job is and that’s to brief a pilot so he gets to his destination safely,” he said.

Lockheed is working to revise that FAA specification to allow specialists more time to enter information into the system after receiving a call, Courain said.

“[The performance goal] puts the specialist in a conflict situation,” he said.

Such support for its employees is proof that the flight service station workers no longer need a union, Courain said, an argument the corporation made to Bangor workers in recent weeks through a mandatory meeting and DVD. The union, with its more limited funds, made its case by sending a representative for one day, according to one worker who declined to be named.

Though still undecided about whether to join the union, the worker said he would vote in its favor.

“I do believe that the option should be there,” he said.