Sanders' skepticism about expanding legal immigration, particularly guest worker programs, reflects a broader tension within the immigrant rights movement that long separated organized labor and allies like Sanders from other center-left and business community stakeholders.
There is some debate among industry experts over whether big airlines should operate experiments like Starfish with separate labor contracts.
Delta was also hindered by rising fuel costs and a separate labor dispute at its Comair regional airline.
DaimlerChrysler's other divisions, Mercedes cars and Freightliner heavy trucks, are not unionized except for one Freightliner factory that has a separate labor contract.
Officials from several Change to Win unions have said in recent months that they were seeing little advantage in maintaining a separate labor federation.
He pointed out that 19 separate labor contracts were due for renewal in the industry, suggesting that rival airlines might not be able to sustain their lower costs.
Until recently, the paid career firefighters who worked in the volunteer houses had separate labor agreements with their firehouses than the city firefighters who worked for the city's Fire and Rescue Department.
It grew out of two separate labor racketeering cases brought in 2003, and marked an important step toward the first election since 2001 at the union, Local 14-14B of the International Union of Operating Engineers.
"In the 1930s, when my grandfather, Dmitry Polenov, was running the museum, somebody denounced him and his wife as English spies, though neither spoke a word of English, and they were sent to separate labor camps for years," said Ms. Polenova.
To save the most on labor costs, the airline would want a separate labor agreement with its pilots' union, as it has at Delta Express, where pilots were originally paid about 20percentt less than their counterparts at the main airline who fly similar Boeing 737's.
