Hundreds of Lufthansa Technicians at BQN Secure Vote to Remove IAM Union

Eric Matos, an airplane technician at Lufthansa Technik’s facility at Rafael Hernandez International Airport (BQN), has secured an opportunity for him and roughly 200 of his colleagues to vote the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union officials out of their workplace.

Matos’ success comes after the General Counsel of the National Mediation Board (NMB) in Washington, DC, rejected IAM union bosses’ attempt to block the employees from voting and scheduled the vote to occur via mail ballot between August 21 and October 16, 2025.

Matos is receiving free legal aid from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys in defending his and his coworkers’ right to vote.

The NMB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal law in the air and rail industries, a task which includes ordering and administering elections to install (or certify) and remove (or decertify) unions.

Under NMB rules, to obtain a vote to decertify a union, workers must submit a petition indicating that at least 50% of similar workers across a “craft or class” under the union’s control want to have such a vote. Matos submitted a petition containing signatures from a majority of his colleagues in order to trigger the decertification election.

The Lufthansa Technik technicians are under the jurisdiction of the Railway Labor Act (RLA), the federal statute that governs labor relations in the air and rail industries. This means that union bosses have the power to enforce contracts that require payment of union dues or fees as a condition of employment, regardless of a state or territory’s Right to Work status (Puerto Rico currently lacks Right to Work protections).

For that reason, rail and air employees must vote union officials out of their workplaces to avoid pay-up-or-be-fired demands.

“The union has only seen us as a dollar sign from the very first day, and they know very well that having us intimidated and divided while feeding us misinformation is an open path for them to obtain that dollar,” commented Matos.

Despite Matos’ submission of a majority-backed decertification petition, IAM union officials made a number of arguments in an attempt to stop the technicians from voting and immunize the union for a whole year from any employee attempts to eject the union.

IAM bosses asked the federal agency to extend by one year the two-year “certification bar” that prevents efforts to oust a union right after it is established at a workplace. The NMB rarely grants such remedies.

Foundation attorneys argued in a May 2025 brief that the union’s allegations of employer interference—which concerned a supposedly illicit pay raise that Lufthansa gave the technicians—weren’t tested in a federal court. For that reason, the brief said, the allegations couldn’t support the union’s argument that the election should be blocked.

In its recent decision, the NMB tossed the union’s request to block the vote and extend the “certification bar,” ruling that “barring extraordinary circumstances, the board does not take action on allegations of interference until the end of an election voting period.”

“Even in cases where election interference is found to have occurred, the remedies the board imposes to eliminate the taint of any such interference are limited…they do not include the kinds of relief the IAM seeks here,” the ruling continues.

In this case, the IAM made the request to block the vote before an election was even approved.

“The NMB was right to reject union bosses’ attempt to prevent Mr. Matos and his colleagues from exercising their right to vote on the IAM’s presence in their workplace,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix.

Mix continued, “While this case has worked out in the Lufthansa technicians’ favor, this case shows the kind of legal tactics and maneuvers that union bosses will attempt to frustrate the will of the workers they claim to represent, just so they can collect forced union dues.”

“The Trump Administration, which is still staffing its federal labor agencies, needs to focus on eliminating barriers to worker free choice, whether those exist in policies at the NMB or at other federal labor boards, like the National Labor Relations Board,” Mix added.