Boomer,
Your posting false information.
No DAL Employee except the pmnw employees pay dues to the IAM.
And please show us evidence and proof of the IAM colluding?
So if a ramper refused to do the work that was in the IAM CBA and no longer in the AMFA CBA, and the employee was disciplined and/or fired, what would AMFA do for the IAM member?
PS the rampers did more R&D and ancillary work for NW than AMFA members did system-wide before the strike.
And I find it funny you ignore the rest of the unions that crossed the picket line and AMFA's sister union the PFAA especially since FAs assisted in cleaning.
700UW,
You are engaging in spin. My comment concerning the offering up of the DAL employees to the IAM was predicated on the statements made by the then NWA/now DAL, from the IAM weblink that has now been deleted, to whit:
"...Ben Hirst and the IAM
Last week we spoke of Richard Andersons management philosophy which included maintaining a close relationship with the unions and their leadership. Mr. Anderson believed that having an open and fair relationship with the unions was a key element to the Companys success. Today we will share Deltas General Counsel and Senior VP Ben Hirsts view on unions and the IAMs role in the airline industry.
Mr. Hirst also worked at Northwest Airlines, under Richard Anderson, prior to hiring on with Delta. Mr. Hirsts title then was Senior VP of Corporate Affairs. He was a key member of the Richard Anderson management team. Here are some excerpts from a speech he gave at one of our IAM District 143 Conventions.
While addressing over 100 union delegates who were in attendance, he asked the question, Why should we care about the union movement? He then answered his question as follows: Well, the union movement supports a decent standard of living for its members, supports job security, which, in my opinion, is in the Companys interest and not just the interest of individual employees…job security provides stability in a work force [and] is a very important element in delivering a product like ours and doing it in a very safe way. Because of this, you have to associate unions with family stability.
He went on to say, Unions, because of their ability to bargain for decent wages, support not only individuals…but also the local economies. Mr. Hirst also stated, Unions stand for safety in the workplace. That is a point I make in Washington again and again and again.
He concluded by stating, I think at the end of the day unions stand for human dignity because they represent people coming together and standing up for themselves in an environment which sometimes is brutal enough to overlook the importance of individuals. So I tell you where I come out on all of this is that the union movement is a very good thing. I learned that in a hard school...."
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You and I both know that the current head of DAL, the former head of NWA, appearing at an IAM convention held for the purpose of celebrating mergers does not include Managment unless and until the IAM is certain that the current managment team heading DAL is willing to become unionized under the IAM. So while you can claim that only a certain percentage of the current DAL/NWA workforce pays union dues to the IAM: we all can recognize a green-light for organization under the IAM.
The question becomes one of how does a managment team formerly at NWA and with the IAM as one of the unions on the property become a spokesman and a current management official at DAL after breaking a Union strike, AMFA, and become a speaker at a union that was on the NWA property but opposed the AMFA labor action?
I offer the following two links, in addition to the statements of Tech2101 and Kev3188, to support my thesis that the IAM colluded with NWA Managment to break the AMFA labor action at NWA and are now being rewarded with no resistance in organizing the merged DAL-NWA workforces:
LINK PROVIDED:
The Strike at Northwest Airlines: Where Is Labor Going? by Peter Rachleff
The Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) strike at Northwest Airlines offers a window into class relations and the state of the labor movement in the United States. What we can see through that window is very grim. As key sectors of the U.S. economy continue to struggle with overcapacity (or what Marxist economists would call overaccumulation), workers are being forced to bear the burden by a ruling elite which is unwilling to give up its perquisites and privileges. The lions share of productivity increases in the past two decades have gone to capital, while workers have faced wage cuts, higher healthcare costs, reduced benefits, disappeared pensions, rewritten work rules, and economic insecurity. Unions have been unable to mount an effective counteroffensive against this onslaught, let alone an effective defense.
THE STRIKE
On August 19, 4,400 mechanics, cleaners, and custodians, members of AMFA, walked off the job at Northwest Airlines facilities, primarily in Minneapolis and Detroit, with smaller units in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Memphis and Atlanta. The convoluted clock of the Railway Labor Acts mediation process had ticked down to zero hour, and the Bush administration had announced that, despite its authority to do so, it would not intervene. (In this deregulated industry, the government has continued to regulate labor, as a railroad engineer friend of mine has bitterly pointed out on too many occasions.) NWAs final offer included the right to contract out 53% of the mechanics work and all of the custodians and cleaners work, a wage reduction of 26%, changes in the rules for sick days and vacations, changes in work rules, and the transformation of a pension plan that was more than thirty years old from defined benefit to a 401(k). They insisted that they needed $176 million per year (raised ¬ or is that lowered? ¬ to $203 million at a bargaining session three weeks into the strike) in cost savings from AMFAs members as part of their larger target of $2.3 billion per year from all of its workers. The mechanics, cleaners, and custodians felt that they had no choice. If they accepted the contract, more than half of them would lose their jobs, while the survivors would face terms and conditions that many said they would never be willing to work under. And so they struck.
AMFA is a small union which only in recent years has been chosen by mechanics to represent them at major airlines. It has a small treasury and no strike fund. It is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO and has had little connection with other unions since its emergence on NWA property six years ago. But AMFA members, particularly the mechanics, were confident that NWA could not run effective operations without them. Not only were their skills, licenses and certificates of value, but they felt that their informal knowledge of their airlines planes, rules, and practices made them irreplaceable. With the other NWA unions ¬ the largest being the flight attendants represented by the independent Professional Flight Attendants Association (PFAA), the baggage handlers and ticket agents represented by the International Association of Machinists (IAM), and the pilots represented by the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) ¬ facing demands for major concessions, AMFA hoped for significant support, perhaps even sympathy strikes (legal in industries regulated by the Railway Labor Act). AMFA also hoped for help from non-NWA, non-airline unions, who they expected would recognize what they had at stake in this struggle.
As I write this article, some six weeks into the strike (early October), some of this has come to pass, and some of it hasnt. Ill discuss all of that below. The strike has persisted with impressive unity and activism among the strikers. The union reports that about 300 of its members retired on the eve of the strike, and that about 40 (less than 1%) have crossed their own picket lines. NWAs business appears to have continued unfazed, although there is more to say about this, too. In mid-September the airline declared bankruptcy and announced that they would begin to make permanent hires out of some of their temporary replacements. They have also announced that they will lay off 900 flight attendants (with whose union they are in the midst of bargaining concessions) by the end of October, and another 500 by January. The IAM and ALPA are waiting in line for their turn at the concessions table (or is it a guillotine?). Despite what has turned into a virtual media blackout, the strike persists.
UNION BUSTING 101
NWAs labor relations strategy has deep roots in the tangled, bloody recent financial history of the airlines industry, coincident with the turn of the capitalist macroeconomy to neo-liberalism. Like most U.S. airlines, it has teetered on the edge of economic collapse since the dawn of deregulation, the Staggers Act of 1978 (passed by the same Democratic-led Congress and Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, who could not pass national pro-labor legislation). Since then airlines have come and gone, with lots of new low-cost carriers entering the industry, only to exit almost as quickly, and several of the long-operating national carriers declaring bankruptcy, some to reorganize and some, like Pan American and Eastern, to go out of business altogether. Most of the major carriers have also restructured their operations along lines that our brothers and sisters in the construction industry would recognize as double-breasting. That is, they have set up their own regional carriers, largely owned and certainly controlled by the big airlines, and then supplied them with smaller planes, for which they hired lower-paid workers, some union, some not, while guaranteeing them the business of ferrying passengers from smaller cities to their major hubs. These major airlines have contracted out the spokes in their hub-and-spoke systems ¬ to themselves, in disguise (masked?), serving as their own sub-contractors. And then the carriers use the lower wages and benefits paid by the regionals to pressure their own workers in the name of competition.
The tangled webs of the airlines industry dont end here. The major carriers, beneficiaries of regional monopoly status (NWA has controlled 80-85% of business in the Twin Cities, its major hub), slug it out with each other like those old plastic knock-your-block-off robots that kids played with before the invention of video games, in an environment in which the prices have been kept down despite rising costs. They groan under the weight of pension obligations (the product of decades of collectively bargained contracts), union wage scales and work rules, and rising fuel costs. But the owners of their airplanes (GE Credit is the major owner of the planes in the air over the US regardless of the carrier monogram painted on the tailfin) and the owners of their debt (banks, financial institutions, mutual funds, and the like) have made healthy profits. The airlines executives, major preferred stock holders, and financial players have not done too shabbily either. Through inflated salaries (keeping up with their counterparts in the rest of the business world), bonuses, and stock options, they have emptied airlines coffers of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. At NWA alone, in just the past two years, a handful of executives dumped $400 million in stock they had purchased through options, before the stock tanked from $50 a share to $4 a share to $1.50 a share. Their ability to avoid prosecution, led alone public calumny, suggests how clumsy their buddies at Tyco, Enron, and the like, must have been.
The point is not the greed and misdeeds of the executives, although there has been plenty of that. It is the creation, through economics, politics, and power, of a system in which workers create profits that cannot be ploughed back into that industry for the lack of profitable investment outlets. That wealth is siphoned off to other outlets, the financial industry itself, for one (where did GE Credit and GM Credit get their capital from?), but also including the skyrocketing consumption patterns of the top owners (including, in NWAs Al Checcis case, a quixotic, self-funded campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in California). At some point, in the airlines, clearly, at this point, a crisis is reached.
And then the workers are targeted as the solution to the crisis. They must work more and earn less. They must adapt their human needs (families, leisure, the pursuit of personal growth, hobbies, interests, community participation, citizenship) to the demands of their employer for a workforce that is on call, available, flexible. If not, if they balk, they can be replaced, with other workers more desperate than they, from their own communities, from elsewhere in the U.S., from elsewhere in the world. And if they are organized into unions and try to use those unions to defend what they and their predecessors have built, then those unions must be broken.
NWA made extensive preparations for AMFAs strike. They hired and trained 1200 replacement mechanics, lodged them in hotels near their hubs in Minneapolis and Detroit, and reassigned management personnel with the appropriate certificates and licenses to take off their white shirts and ties, put on overalls, and go back into the hangars. They expanded their global outsourcing (farming out, the industry calls it, in one of the weirder etymological constructions Ive ever encountered) of repair and service work, with contractors in Singapore, Hong Kong, El Salvador, and Mexico, as well as non-union facilities in the U.S. South, performing routine maintenance work. (AMFA inherited a contract negotiated by the IAM which had included no language limiting farming out. In their first contract, they reached a compromise figure of 38%, which NWA wanted to raise to 53% in their current proposal. These percentages are calculated not in jobs, human bodies, or hours, but by monetary value. Hence, if a mechanic in Singapore makes half or less of what his U.S. counterpart makes, the amount of work that can contractually be outsourced is much higher than we might imagine.)
NWAs preparations went far beyond getting their repair work done. Four months before the strike began, they secretely contracted with ABM, the countrys largest corporate cleaner, for all of the custodians jobs for the next several years. They also contracted with a local temp agency, Globe Services, for the cleaners jobs. They hired Vance Security International, an infamous anti-union private security firm, and their reviled Asset Protection Team, to intimidate strikers and those workers who might consider honoring picket lines. And they relied on their well-established relationships with the government (state and national) and the mass media to get their agenda implemented, sanctioned, and represented as necessary and a done deal.
NWA had relied as much and as long on government assistance, even in the ostensibly deregulated environment of the neo-liberal era, as they did on concessions from their workers. In 1993 NWA management cried Wolf! (er, threatened bankruptcy) and put out their hands. They pressured workers to make major concessions and asked the state of Minnesota to provide them an $823 million loan at below market interest rates. In return they promised to build a maintenance hub in economically depressed northern Minnesota which would employ some 900 mechanics. They got the loan but never built the facility. They have still not repaid the loan and state officials, who had nothing to do with the granting of that sweetheart loan, refuse not just to call it in, but refuse to even discuss its status. Meanwhile, other branches of government, such as the Metropolitan Airport Commission, have continued to function as NWAs junior partner, from fighting neighbors who complain about noise pollution to limiting free speech and picketing at the airport to marginalizing other carriers who would like access to more convenient gates for their service. In some crazy paroxysm of popular democracy back in the glory days of the early 1970s, an earlier incarnation of the MAC actually passed an anti-scab regulation which the current administration has refused to implement.
And, then, of course, there is the federal government. Not only did Congress enact deregulation at the airlines bidding in 1978, but ensuing presidents have carefully used their power to intervene or not in labor conflicts to set the stage for and enhance corporate managements exercise of its power. In the current strike, AMFAs insistence that NWAs new repair and maintenance system was/is unsafe seems borne out by hundreds of complaints filed by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspectors. Two days into the strike, a veteran (more than 20 years service) inspector in the Twin Cities was reassigned to a desk after NWA complained that he was too aggressive in enforcing rules and regulations. Two weeks later, he brought more than 470 complaints, of his own and from many of his peers, to U.S. Senator Mark Dayton, who called on the Office of the Inspector General to investigate. The FAA inspectors own union called for a public investigation. A month later, six weeks into the strike, there have been no results of the investigations, other than a statement by the head of the FAA (a Bush appointee) that all is well at Northwest Airlines. There is also the matter of NWAs ¬ and the other major airlines ¬ pension obligations. After years of ignoring, with apparent impunity (where were the auditors and the government officials who should have been checking the auditors books?), their commitments to channel funds regularly into the workers pension accounts, NWA and other airlines (and other corporate employers throughout the economy) are revealing that they failed to do so and, now, cannot afford to make up the difference. Threatening to dump their pension obligations under a bankruptcy filing and leave it all to the governments Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (which United Airlines has done), NWA and other airlines have asked Congress to pass legislation allowing them to defer, delay, and spread out their collectively bargained and legal pension obligations. Surprisingly, they have not asked for a parallel bill that would require their workers to delay, defer, and spread out their aging and dying. Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman, an utter corporate hack, has introduced legislation to allow the airlines to make their desired changes, while proclaiming that he and his fellow senators will enact this legislation in order to protect workers interests. While it has become difficult to sort tragedy from farce, it is clear that NWAs lobbying dollars have been well-spent.
Let us not forget the media. NWA has spent millions of dollars advertising in Twin Cities media outlets, which are, of course, controlled by corporations with similar goals and needs. Neither of the Twin Cities major daily newspapers have labor reporters. Their airline industry reporters were assigned to the story, with support from new reporters who knew none of the history of labor relations in the industry or the region. Editors seemed concerned to confine dimensions of the story to the nether regions of the papers. For instance, when NWA hired Vance Security in the week before the strike began, I informed the St. Paul Pioneer Press lead reporter, who had no idea who they were, that her own employer, Knight Ridder, had hired Vance in the Detroit newspaper strike of the mid-1990s and that she had an obligation to disclose this when she wrote about their introduction into the NWA scene. Instead, her editor took her off the story, placed a story by another reporter mentioning union complaints about an unnamed private security company on the obituary page (really!) and held back from mentioning Vance by name for another month! The Minneapolis Star Tribune has gone so far as to publish a human interest profile of a scab on the front page (above the fold!) of their business section. Despite pressure from the union, they held back on a story about the FAA investigations until October 2. The electronic media has not been much better. While Minnesota Public Radio has offered some in-depth analysis of the strike, they have typically sought out objective commentators, most of whom hail from the University of Minnesotas Carlson School of Business, while the commercial networks attention spans have been limited to 15 second visuals and soundbites. All have continued to feed the flying publics addiction to low prices at any cost (the spread of Wal-martization). None have been willing to ask probing questions about the industry, its history, and its workers. Needless to say, all of this has been fed by NWAs public relations machine and it has, in turn, fed an environment in which managements position has seemed reasonable and the only choice.
This has especially been the case with NWAs decision to declare bankruptcy in mid-September, a month into the strike and month before scheduled changes in federal bankruptcy laws. Encouraged by the example of United Airlines, which has spent three years in bankruptcy, shedding workers, lowering wages, and dumping pension obligations, NWA sought to enter bankruptcy under the same rules. They have claimed that the AMFA strike played no role in their decision and that AMFA will have no voice as the bankruptcy process unfolds. That may well be managements intent, and this could be part of what has already proven itself to be a very well-conceived plan, but it is also true that by bringing its day-to-day business decisions, practices, and outcomes into a public courtroom, NWA management will become more vulnerable to union investigations and more susceptible to appeals to the public. For instance, in the last week of September, NWA came before the bankruptcy judge ¬ and in the public eye ¬ to request that they be allowed to pay top management their annual bonuses! The judge may allow this, but not before the union and its allies are able to bring this ¬ loudly ¬ to the attention of the public. Interestingly, this announcement was made just as AMFA was announcing that it had hired Ray Rogers and his Corporate Campaign, Inc., to conduct strategic research and develop public relations for their struggle. While bankruptcy will strengthen the airlines hand in its continued collective bargaining with other NWA unions, it could well also leave it more vulnerable to unconventional union strategies.
NWA managements effective implementation of its well-conceived, well-funded union busting strategy has caught the attention of corporate managers and their consultants not only in the airlines industry but throughout the economy. If they succeed, other unions can expect to face similar all-encompassing strategies. But it is also important to note that this struggle is far from over. Bankruptcy, on the one hand, and the still unsettled relations with other unions, on the other, within a context of continuing questions about NWAs safety and its ability to fly its schedule with an over-worked cohort of reassigned managers and partially trained replacements providing maintenance, suggests that many twists and turns still lie ahead.
SOLIDARITY FOREVER?
No factor is more important than the support ¬ or lack of support ¬ that the strikers receive from other unions. Throughout the airlines industry, reminiscent of the railroads a century ago when Eugene V. Debs argued for the creation of one big railway union, multiple unions fragment workers organization. Different occupational groups ¬ pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, baggage handlers, ticket agents, white collar workers, etc. ¬ belong to different unions at the same airlines and to different unions across the airlines. Unity of action has been effectively blocked for decades, despite legal access to the right to sympathy strike (the Taft-Hartley Act does not apply to industries regulated by the Railway Labor Act). Unions have been pitted against each other at the bargaining table, even moreso in the concessionary environment of the past decade. The larger labor movement has not provided effective mechanisms (e.g., the AFL-CIOs Transportation Trades Department) to bring unions together. Unions have been largely left on their own, for better or, more often, for worse.
The particular history of unions at NWA needs some discussion because it has played a key role in these dynamics ¬ and because it might hold the key to a very disturbing scenario that might play out in the weeks and months ahead.
The IAM has excoriated AMFA as raiders and elitists, and they have, so far, convinced the AFL-CIO to withhold its support and to encourage its affiliates to do the same. Interest in AMFA grew at NWA after the fiasco of the 1993 round of concessions. NWA threatened bankruptcy and demanded major concessions from its workers (as well as that blackmailed loan from the state of Minnesota). In exchange for 20% wage concessions, they offered common stock which they promised to buy back (but never did, which has been the subject of several lawsuits) and also promised that, three to five years down the road, the wages would snap back (which they did). When the mechanics, cleaners, custodians, baggage handlers, ticket agents, and white collar office workers said No, their union, the International Association of Machinists District 143, insisted that they vote, revote, and re-revote (what is democracy the third time over?) on the same package. As voter turnout plummeted, the concessionary contract was finally ratified. Union members soon used another expression of democracy to vote IAM District 143 and IAM Local 1833 officers out of office, and, when the new officers proved as inept as their predecessors in the next round of bargaining, a core group of mechanics turned to AMFA, circulated election cards, and promoted, successfully, a change in affiliation. They argued that they needed a union that would be democratic and transparent, under its members control, and they argued that skilled mechanics could do better for themselves without being tied to the mix of workers represented by the IAM. Their craft orientation certainly evinced some elitism towards other workers along with their frustration towards the IAM. Interestingly, in the midst of this process, the IAM used its influence with the National Mediation Board (this was during the Clinton administration) to get the bargaining unit redrawn to include the custodians and cleaners in AMFAs jurisdiction. They were hoping that these workers, who had not been courted by AMFAs advocates, would vote to stay with the IAM and thereby defeat the reaffiliation. But AMFA won the 1999 representation election hands down and went on to negotiate a contract that brought substantial (20% and more) wage increases to workers whose wages had stagnated for more than a decade. They also instituted internal union practices which cemented the allegiance of their members. AMFA locals have no bureaucracy, no full-time officers. AMFA officers wear the same overalls and work the same jobs as the women and men they represent. AMFAs practice of collective bargaining also allows for an open door to rank-and-file observers. Any member who wishes to watch a bargaining session is welcome to attend, despite fierce protests from corporate management. Although AMFA did not seek to include the cleaners and custodians within its ranks, they have been integrated into the unions internal life at a local level.
Readers also need to understand what has happened among the flight attendants. They were long represented (this is generous use of this verb) by the Teamsters sprawling Local 2000. In the mid-1990s, the same wave of rank-and-file protest and energy that brought Ron Carey to the national presidency of the Teamsters shook Local 2000. A slate of candidates led by partisans of Teamsters for a Democratic Union were elected to the leadership of Local 2000. They initiated an aggressive campaign of internal organizing (phone-tree and email-linked contact action teams tied the locals more than 14,000 members together) and internal education. But when Carey was toppled and replaced by James Hoffa, the national Teamsters officialdom began to crack down on Local 2000s leaders. Hoffa appointed a personal representative to attend every meeting of the unions executive board as well as membership meetings. This personal representative, long known for throwing his muscle around his home local (Local 120 in the Twin Cities) began to disrupt the executive board, to gay-bait as well as red-bait its leaders, and to bring their activities to a grinding halt. Shortly after the NWA mechanics defected to AMFA, frustrated flight attendants launched their own campaign to withdraw from the Teamsters and start their own independent union, modeled after AMFA, called the Professional Flight Attendants Association. When Hoffa responded by placing Local 2000 under trusteeship, he pretty much guaranteed that the Teamsters would lose the election, which they did.
Theres more. When NWA compelled unions to accept concessions in exchange for common stock in 1993, they offered a seat on the board of directors to a representative from each union. Once the ink was dry on the deal, they insisted that these individual directors had a fiduciary responsibility to the company and could not share inside information with the unions and workers whose interests they were supposed to represent. Bad enough? No, theres more. When 10,000 mechanics, cleaners, and custodians elected AMFA to represent their interests and 14,000 flight attendants elected PFAA, NWA refused to give them seats on the board. They continued to treat the IAM and the Teamsters as if they still represented the very workers who had voted them out, and they still sit there. Behind closed doors, AMFA and PFAA activists and their supporters discuss a nightmare scenario in which both unions would be broken by NWA, decertified, and then replaced, via sweetheart agreements, by the IAM and the Teamsters, allowing NWA to continue to represent itself as a union airline. Stranger things have happened.
That these two unions hostile to the mechanics, custodians, cleaners, and flight attendants now reside in the two opposing factions of the so-called labor movement (or is it organized labor?), has undermined the strikers ability to mobilize labor support. The IAM and the AFL-CIO have been overtly hostile. The IAM not only ordered its members to cross AMFAs picket lines (they threatened to replace the president of Local 1833 and trustee the local if he did not cross), but it also negotiated with NWA to take back work, such as the pushing back of airplanes, which had been theirs before the 1999 redrawing of the bargaining units. Rick Banks, the director of the AFL-CIOs Collective Bargaining Department, privately ordered all state labor federations, city central labor bodies, and affiliates not to provide AMFA strikers with food, money, or other forms of material support, or advocating a boycott of NWA, even as AFL-CIO national president John Sweeney was claiming publicly that their beef was with AMFA but not the striking workers. Leaders of central labor bodies in the Twin Cities moved quickly to discourage affiliated unions from offering support, speaking at rallies, or welcoming AMFA speakers at their meetings. The Teamsters have not been as overly hostile, but their behavior bears scrutiny. IBT national vice-president Tom Keegle resides in the Twin Cities (where he collects ¬ I hesitate to say earns ¬ two of his multiple salaries), and he has refused to take calls from AMFA leaders. Despite the intercession of ILWU national president James Spinosa, IBT national president James Hoffa has been similarly unavailable. Individual UPS drivers have refused to cross AMFA picket lines, and some have come out to join the picket lines, but the range of support which might be available from the Teamsters has not been forthcoming. This has been further complicated by the announcement that the Teamsters are circulating representation cards to flight attendants on NWA property, on the heels of a similar announcement from the CWA-affiliated Association of Flight Attendants. The launching of a three-way representational squabble in the midst of contract negotiations which threaten substantial job and pay cuts, in the midst of the mechanics strike, has hardly contributed to the flight attendants figuring out how they can bring their solidarity to this struggle.
I do not want to suggest that there has been no labor support forthcoming, although this has been one of the defeatist mantras recited over and over by the mass media. Indeed, I have been very involved in the Twin Cities Northwest Workers Solidarity Committee, and we have counterparts in Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco. These networks of local activists have been able to solicit, secure, and mobilize support for the strikers from dozens of unions and hundreds of rank-and-file workers. Particularly significant support here has come from the three AFSCME locals at the University of Minnesota, who had their own strike two years ago, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE) which struck the state of Minnesota along with AFSCME (whose council president Eliot Seide has been particularly active in opposing support for AMFA) in 2001, several SEIU locals, UNITE-HERE Local 17 (whose president, Jaye Rykunyk, was able to convince their national executive board to issue a memo ordering union representatives not to fly NWA), David Foster, the Director of United Steel Workers District 11, the Lakes and Plains Council of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, the United Transportation Union in Minnesota, some locals from the American Postal Workers Union, and individual activists from the IBEW, the UAW, the CWA, the Amalgamated Transit Union, and others. Supporters in Boston were able to mobilize Jobs with Justice in their community and nationally to step up on behalf of the strikers, despite opposition from the AFL-CIO. The UAW national leadership donated $880,000 (calculated at $200 for each striker) in what continues to be one of the most perplexing positive actions by a labor union. In Detroit and San Francisco, strike supporters have participated in Labor Day parades, pushed (with success in SF and Alameda County) for central labor body resolutions of support, and raised the visibility of the conflict. In all four cities, supporters have organized rallies and fundraisers and participated with AMFA members in actions directed against scabs or corporate officials.
In the Twin Cities, there have been several dramatic actions with broad participation. Two weeks into the strike, hundreds of AMFA members and supporters blocked buses transporting scabs from their hotels to the airport. An entire shift was delayed for several hours. Another two weeks later, supporters leaving a rally near the airport formed a car caravan with more than 100 vehicles, jamming the access road to the main gate for the scab buses, and delaying yet another shift. These actions helped bring the strike back into the medias closing eye, interfered with NWAs ability to get its repair work done (they sued the union after one of them and pressured the police to rescind a picketing permit after the other), built a sense of unity among the participants, and raised the spirits of the strikers by demonstrating to them that they were not alone.
No one believes, however, that such actions can win the strike. The refusal of ALPA, the PFAA and the IAM to honor AMFAs picket lines, despite their legal right to do so, has been a particular point of weakness and frustration. IAMs leadership is so overtly hostile to AMFA that their position is not surprising. Half a dozen rank-and-file IAM members have refused to cross the picket lines, despite threats by their own union that they would never get them their jobs back and that they would see to it that other unions did not contribute to their finances. They have become local folk heroes, the moral center of the struggle, as have a similar handful of flight attendants who have either refused to work or have written up safety infractions and spoken publicly about it. As the strike began, the PFAA leadership put out to a mail ballot a measure as to whether the PFAA as an organization should honor AMFAs picket lines. The leadership sat silent during the voting period, however, while NWA management muscled the flight attendants. They sent out two memos and several emails threatening to fire any flight attendant who refused to report to work, even though they do not have the right to fire them. They brought back more than 1,000 flight attendants who had been on lay-off, and they made it known that they were planning to replace U.S. flight attendants with Japanese and Thai attendants on flights that originated in Asia. The vote failed to pass. The pilots came to this conflict determined to prevent a NWA bankruptcy due to the threat that represented to their pensions. They knew that they had the power to shut the airline down, and the legal right to use it, but they were afraid that this would drive the airline immediately into bankruptcy. Now that NWA has filed bankruptcy anyway, ALPA appears to prefer to count on the Coleman bill to reform NWAs pensions to taking their fates into their own hands by walking out with the mechanics. Individual pilots have raised safety questions, delayed and even caused the cancellation of flights, but the union refuses to act collectively.
Meanwhile, NWA has continued to roll a reign of terror over the flight attendants. Dozens have been summoned to Q-and-A sessions, where they are taken into a room by corporate representatives and threatened with discipline for having written up safety problems on their flights. One flight crew was questioned by the FBI for having possibly disconnected smoke detectors in the lavatories of a Tokyo flight. One flight attendant was publicly fired for having refused to cross the AMFA picket lines at the beginning of the strike. When it was made clear that she had been within her rights under the Railway Labor Act, management quietly informed her that she should consider herself furloughed. The media never reported the change in her status.
Welcome to labor relations in the era of neo-liberalism. Weve seen bits and pieces of all this since the Hormel strike of 1985-86, maybe even before. Corporate management, the government, and union leaders have all followed similar scripts before. Its never quite come together so thoroughly, so quickly, and so starkly, though. It seems ironic that this story has unfolded in the 100th anniversary year of the founding of the IWW, the 70th anniversary of the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, the 50th anniversary of the merger of the AFL and the CIO, and the 20th anniversary of the Hormel strike. At the same time, I want to emphasize that this struggle is far from over. AMFAs ranks are holding firm, the other NWA unions have yet agree to contract terms saddling them with their share of the concessions, the significance of the bankruptcy situation has yet to reveal itself, and the sleeping giant of the U.S. labor movement might awaken at any moment and demonstrate that it does not deserve the Wobblies sobriquet of the American Separation of Labor.
[Peter Rachleff is a founding member of Airline Workers United and a Professor of Labor History at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.]
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LINK PROVIDED:
A Maverick Union Chief Now in Search of Unity
August 25, 2005
A Maverick Union Chief Now in Search of Unity
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
As president of the union representing mechanics at Northwest Airlines, O.V. Delle-Femine has repeatedly urged, almost begged, the rest of organized labor to show solidarity with his union's walkout.
But other unions have largely shunned his call, and that is hardly surprising considering that Mr. Delle-Femine has long been viewed within the labor movement as Mr. Antisolidarity.
Ever since he founded the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association 43 years ago, Mr. Delle-Femine has been something of a labor pariah, enraging the machinists and other unions by repeatedly seeking to steal their members.
A lonely, often quixotic figure known for sleeping in airports as he crisscrossed the country to enlist members, Mr. Delle-Femine (pronounced dell-FEM-in-knee) has said that other unions do a poor job representing mechanics. He has further angered the labor community by asserting that elite mechanics should not be in the same union as less-exalted baggage handlers, whom his union has called ''bag smashers.''
Notwithstanding the minuscule support from other unions -- including Northwest's other unions -- Mr. Delle-Femine contends that the 4,430 striking mechanics have the upper hand in their showdown with the airline. But Northwest has kept most of its fleet operating by hiring 1,900 mechanics as replacements and so far, the airline insists, it has maintained close to a regular schedule.
Northwest said that it completed 96.9 percent of its flights on Tuesday -- a statement that union officials assert is inaccurately upbeat and aimed at demoralizing the strikers.
''It's unconscionable what they did -- they planned this for 18 months,'' Mr. Delle-Femine said in a telephone interview. ''It's just a union-busting operation. They want to destroy our union. It's a sham and it's a sad situation.''
At age 72, Mr. Delle-Femine still speaks in the same stout, unyielding machine-gun patter that has unnerved airline executives and other labor leaders for decades. He has attacked Northwest without inhibition for outsourcing jobs and for spending months training replacements.
Five-foot-one, bespectacled and built like a fire plug, Mr. Delle-Femine asserted that Northwest could not sustain operations adequately for over a week or two during the strike.
''What we're hoping to achieve, like any other strike, is to force the company back to the bargaining table to become realistic,'' he said. ''We cannot accept their draconian proposals.''
Northwest has demanded that Mr. Delle-Femine accept $176 million in wage cuts, other concessions and a halving of the number of mechanics, saying tough steps are needed to avoid bankruptcy. And it insists that it is prepared to ride out a long strike to achieve its goals.
Kurt Ebenhoch, a Northwest spokesman, said the airline's operations had improved each day since the strike began on Saturday. ''We are prepared to operate the airline with our new maintenance organization indefinitely,'' he said.
Mr. Ebenhoch denied that Northwest was trying to destroy the mechanics' union, known as AMFA. ''Nothing can be further from the truth,'' he said. ''We've worked diligently to try to reach an agreement with AMFA, and we have a long history of working amicably and professionally with other unions.'' The union and the company are not currently negotiating.
Mr. Delle-Femine has long infuriated other unions by telling mechanics that they would be better off quitting their larger, more general unions and joining his small craft union. For him, a principal theme -- which clashes with what much of organized labor stands for -- is that the mechanics' strength lies in their skills, not in their numbers.
''The mechanics' union is quite weakened by its isolation,'' said John Fossum, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. ''If they had the support of the other unions, especially the machinists, which represents the largest number of employees at Northwest -- all the baggage handlers and gate agents -- they really could have shut the airline down.''
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