FAA pitches drug-testing abroad

The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed mandatory drug and alcohol testing for employees of aircraft-repair shops in other countries.

If the FAA proposal becomes final, foreign shops that perform certain safety-related work on planes would have to electronically transmit results of employee tests to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The FAA said Wednesday that its proposal would affect nearly 1,000 repair shops in 65 countries.

Unions representing U.S. aircraft mechanics have long pushed for more scrutiny of foreign shops, calling it an issue of safety and protecting U.S. jobs. In 2012, Congress directed the FAA to write testing regulations covering foreign shops.

But the FAA moved slowly, saying that other countries and the operators of their repair stations would object to the U.S. imposing conditions on their workers. Drug-testing rules dating to the 1980s do not cover situations in which mandatory testing would violate another country’s laws or policies.

On Wednesday, however, the agency said that raising the standards on foreign shops would be an important safety measure because few countries require drug and alcohol testing of aircraft-maintenance workers.

Unions that have fought the FAA over the issue praised the agency’s turnabout.

“This is a great first step toward addressing the scourge of offshoring the vital maintenance of U.S.-flagged passenger jets,” John Samuelsen, president of the Transport Workers Union. “We’ve been fighting this for years.”

Samuelsen said the FAA should go further by requiring that foreign workers meet the same licensing and criminalrecords checks that apply to U.S. workers who maintain planes for airlines. He said the FAA should demand the right to make unannounced inspections of foreign shops. The current requirement to give foreign shops 72-hours notice “is a gaping hole in security,” he said in an interview. In 72 hours, an airline or foreign operator “can clean up a mess that endangers U.S. flyers.”

Leaders of the AFL-CIO said testing of workers in foreign aircraft shops “is long overdue and necessary.” They called the FAA proposal “an opportunity to correct an egregious safety oversight that has existed for too long in our aviation system.”

The trade group representing major U.S. airlines did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The FAA will publish its proposed rule in the Federal Register today and allow 60 days for anyone to submit comments.