The Northwest Airlines Strike: Where is Labor Going?

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 lion’s 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, 4400 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 Act’s “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.)

NWA’s final offer included the right to contract out 53% of the mechanics’ work as well as all the custodians’ and cleaners’ work, a wage reduction of 26%, tightening rules for sick days and vacations, changing work rules, and transforming a longstanding pension plan from defined benefit to a 401(k).  They insisted that NWA 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 AMFA’s 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 but to strike.  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.

AMFA is a small union which only in recent years has been chosen by mechanics to represent them at major airlines.  It has no strike fund and is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO; in fact it 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 operate effectively without them.  Not only were their skills, licenses and certificates of value, but they felt that their informal knowledge of their airline’s 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 (Taft-Hartley’s prohibition of which doesn’t apply 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 stakes they had in this struggle.

At this writing, some six weeks into the strike (early October), some of this has come to pass, and some hasn’t.  The strike has persisted with impressive unity and activism.  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.  NWA’s 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 it would begin to make permanent hires out of some of the temporary replacements.

NWA 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

Like most U.S. airlines, NWA 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 major carriers also restructured their operations along lines that our brothers and sisters in the construction industry would recognize as “double-breasting.”

That means 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 subcontractors.  Then they use the lower wages and benefits paid by the regional carriers to pressure their own workers in the name of “competition.”

The tangled webs of the airlines industry don’t 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 United States 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.

In the past two years alone, just before the stock tanked from $50 to $4 and then $1.50 a share, a handful of NWA executives dumped $400 million they had purchased through stock options.  Their ability to avoid prosecution, led alone public calumny, suggests how clumsy their buddies at Tyco and Enron 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 NWA’s Al Checci’s 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.  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 and “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 United States, 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 AMFA’s 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 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 I’ve 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 had inherited a contract negotiated by the IAM which 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.

NWA’s preparations went far beyond getting their repair work done.  Four months before the strike began, they secretely contracted with ABM, the country’s largest corporate cleaner, for all of the custodians’ jobs over 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.”

Sweetheart Deals and Coverups

NWA has relied as much and as long on government assistance, even in the ostensibly deregulated environment of the neoliberal era, as they have on concessions from their workers.  In 1993 NWA management cried “Wolf!” (i.e. 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.  NWA got the loan but never built the facility.  They have still not repaid the loan; state officials, who had nothing to do with the granting of that sweetheart loan, refuse even to discuss its status.

Meanwhile other branches of government, such as the Metropolitan Airport Commission (MAC), have continued to function as NWA’s 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.

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.

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 management’s exercise of power.

In the current strike, AMFA’s insistence that NWA’s 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 20-year veteran 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 and six weeks into the strike, there have been no results other than a statement by the Bush-appointed head of the FAA that all is well at Northwest Airlines.

There is also the matter of NWA’s—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 government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (as 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 and corporate hack Norm Coleman 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 NWA’s 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.

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 went 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 Minnesota’s Carlson School of Business, while the commercial networks’ attention spans have been limited to 15 second visuals and soundbites.

Bankruptcy

All of this has been fed by NWA’s public relations machine and has, in turn, fed an environment in which management’s position has seemed “reasonable” and “the only choice.”  This has especially been the case with NWA’s decision to declare bankruptcy in mid-September, a month into the strike and shortly 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 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 management’s 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 it—loudly—to the attention of the public.

NWA management’s 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 NWA’s 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 Gone 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—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.  Unions have been pitted against each other at the bargaining table, even more so 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”) 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 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 bargaining, when 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, NWA 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 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 “less skilled” airline workers, along with their frustration towards the IAM.

To defeat the recertification drive, 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, 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.

AMFA also instituted internal union practices which cemented the members’ allegiance.  Its 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.  Despite fierce protests from corporate management, any member who wishes to watch a bargaining session is welcome to attend.  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 NWA flight attendants.  They were long represented (a 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: 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.

The IAM and 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 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, director of the AFL-CIO’s “Collective Bargaining Department,” privately ordered all state labor federations, city central labor bodies, and affiliates to deny AMFA strikers food, money, or other forms of material support, or advocating a boycott of NWA. 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 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 a desperate strike over job and pay cuts obviously hasn’t contributed to the flight attendants considering how to bring their solidarity to this struggle.

Activist Support

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, UAW, CWA, 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 S.F. 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 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.  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 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 action 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 showing them that they were not alone.

No one believes, however, that such actions can “win” the strike.  The refusal of ALPA, PFAA and 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.

Intimidation

As the strike began, the PFAA leadership put out a mail ballot 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.

NWA 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 layoff, and 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.

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 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 neoliberalism.  We’ve seen bits and pieces of all this since the Hormel strike of 1985-86, maybe even earlier.  Corporate management, the government, and union leaders have all followed similar scripts.  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.

Yet this struggle is far from over.  AMFA’s ranks are holding firm, the other NWA unions have yet to 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 still awaken at any moment and demonstrate that it does not deserve the Wobblies’ sobriquet of the “American Separation of Labor.”  —October 2, 2005

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Peter Rachleff teaches labor history at Macalester College in St. Paul.  He is currently involved with the Twin Cities Northwest Workers Labor Solidarity Committee.  He was the chairperson of the Twin Cities Local P-9 Support Committee during the Hormel strike of 1985-86 and is the author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and The Future of the Labor Movement.

ATC 119, November-December 2005