TWU informer
Veteran
- Nov 4, 2003
- 7,550
- 3,731
My version is in line with this version:
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-CIO’s “Transportation Trades Department&rdquo
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 AMFA’s jurisdiction. They were hoping that these workers, who had not been courted by AMFA’s 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. AMFA’s 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 union’s 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 local’s 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 2000’s leaders. Hoffa appointed a “personal representative” to attend every meeting of the union’s 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.
There’s 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, there’s 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 AMFA’s 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-CIO’s “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 media’s closing eye, interfered with NWA’s 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 AMFA’s picket lines, despite their legal right to do so, has been a particular point of weakness and frustration. IAM’s 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 AMFA’s 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” NWA’s 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. We’ve 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. It’s 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. AMFA’s 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.”
