|
The United Pension Default: Saving ‘Our
Airline” or Saving Labor?
by Andrew Pollack / June 2005 issue of Socialist Action
On May 10 Judge Eugene Wedoff gave bankrupt United Airlines the
right to terminate its pension plans.
This is the biggest pension default in U.S. history,
and the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation now assumes
responsibility for these plans—which means a bailout for the bosses and
severely slashed pensions for workers. Of course, management pensions have enjoyed
special protection, often through the establishment of special funds that
are protected from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
This is just the latest in a wave of attacks on airline workers—a
wave that is still gaining momentum.
US Airways pension plans had already been terminated, Delta is often
named as the next likely carrier to do so, and others will no doubt tell
their unions they need to end their plans in order to compete.
What’s more, the pension termination comes at a time when the bosses
are attacking pensions and retiree health benefits for the entire working
class, both
through attacks on union contracts and on Social Security, Medicaid,
and Medicare. Unfortunately, this battle is being fought by the airline
unions not as a class-wide one or even industry-wide, but rather at each
carrier as a fight to save “our company.”
Since 9/11, United, the country’s second largest carrier, has laid
off roughly a third of its workforce (including by outsourcing much of its
mechanics’ work,
both in the U.S. and in Central America), has cut retirees' health benefits,
and extracted wage and work-rule concessions several times.
Judge Wedoff is the same judge who on Jan. 31, 2005, had imposed
"temporary" wage and benefit cuts on United Airlines mechanics.
The pilots and flight attendants had already agreed to concessionary contracts,
but threatened job actions should their pensions be cut—actions which never
materialized. After his May 10
pension-killing ruling, Wedoff moved right on to the next point on his
agenda, holding hearings to terminate the mechanics’ and ground crews’ contracts
if they didn’t knuckle under to management’s latest concession demands.
The mechanics, represented by the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal
Association (AMFA), and the ground crew, represented by the International
Association of
Machinists (IAM), who had not yet approved new contracts, also threatened
strikes should their contracts be voided. But despite making loud strike
threats in the days after the May 10 pension ruling, AMFA’s
leadership caved in on May 16 and gave United the concessions they’d been
asking for.
As of the writing of this article, the IAM appears headed toward reaching
a similar concessionary contract. The judge halted hearings for two days to
encourage them to do so.
The United attacks ran on parallel tracks with those at US Airways.
In the last year US Airways has played the bankruptcy card to slash jobs,
wages, and benefits and to terminate pension plans and dump its pension obligations
on the PBGC. And as at United they've counted on support from friendly
bankruptcy court judges.
The same month that Judge Wedoff slashed United workers' pay, his
colleague, Judge Stephen Mitchell, terminated US Airways' Machinist
contract for mechanics and ground crews, and as at United the judge said
his order would be moot if a new contract were agreed upon. IAM officials
responded to the judge’s killing of their contract by continuing talks with
management rather than striking, despite having threatened to do so two
days before the judge’s
ruling.
The knuckling under of US Airways unions to management and the
courts came despite an apparent willingness of the ranks to fight back, as
shown in the December holiday sick-outs that caused the cancellation of hundreds
of flights. What’s worse, despite the fact that United and US Airways
workers were going through the exact same process in the same months, there
was
no talk of joint action by the airlines’ workers. In fact it’s rare
these days to hear of joint action, or even discussion, among unions at a
single airline.
Government agencies have also aided management's concession drive at
United, US Airways, and other airlines through the Feds’ Air Transportation
Stabilization Board (ATSB). This agency, set up supposedly to tide carriers’
through the post-9/11 hard times, has been used regularly during bargaining
to extract more concessions in return for continued loans or extension
on repayments (or to tell management they need no ATSB loans because they
can get them from private financiers—knowing this means the latter will
impose draconian cuts).
Why the cuts?
Management and their media friends have portrayed the cuts as
inevitable economy measures due, on the one-hand, to recent events such as
the post 9/11 traffic downturn, the Iraq war, rising fuel prices, and the
SARS scares, and, on the other hand, to the need of the “legacy carriers,”
i.e. the older and
bigger ones, to mimic the low-wage and low-cost structures of those
that sprung up under deregulation.
The bosses have used all these as excuses to seek cuts they'd
planned long before, eliminating over 150,000 jobs and slashing wages and
benefits, contracting out work, and at the same time using the 9/11 events
in
particular to beg Washington to subsidize them with loans. This Congress
and the White House did so willingly, setting up the ATSB and providing
billions
in grants and loan guarantees—on the condition, also willingly accepted,
that the money be used for management's restructuring plans and not for the
benefit of the workers in the industry.
(When asked why management didn’t use their “business interruption
insurance” to cover their 9/11-related losses, they reminded Congress of
the sanctity of business secrets, with US Airways spokesman David Castelveter
testifying: "That's something I don't think we would publicly discuss
with anyone.")
But the attacks by airline bosses long predate 9/11, taking on new
heights with the start of deregulation in 1979. Of course, the airline
industry was only one
of many experiencing deregulation-related attacks on labor, and
deregulation was just one of many tools used by bosses throughout the
economy to deal with the long economic downturn of the last three decades.
For much of the 1990s, as the airlines went through the second round
of deregulation, they enjoyed the same wild and profitable times as the
rest of the new high-tech, high-roller economy, and existing and new carriers
overspent on planes and gates, in the process racking up massive amounts of
debt. Now that the bill is coming due for the party you know who gets stuck
with the tab.
The same game was played during the first round of deregulation in
the 1980s, when there was a similar wild ride of over-expansion that labor
was expected to pay for. And it wasn’t just older carriers that had trouble;
many new, nonunion, low-cost carriers that seemed to be headed to market
dominance folded or were absorbed. This should be kept in mind when
confronting
management claims that cuts are inevitable if “our” airline is to be
saved from low-cost competition. When
the shake-out from this round of deregulation is
over, and the economy recovers (even if only temporarily), it’s just
as likely that some of the current low-cost carriers will be out of
business and the older carriers will be sitting pretty on profits extracted
from worker concessions—unless sufficient resistance is put up.
The other lesson that should be learned from the lost battles of the
first round of deregulation is the folly of centering the fight on
individual “evil” owners, such as Lorenzo and Icahn In fact, in the middle
of the battle this May at United, Icahn was making news for his struggle to
gain more control of Blockbuster, proving once again that "our"
companies' bosses' first concern is not flying people but making profits.
The division of airlines into larger, older carriers with extensive
international as well as domestic route structures, and new low-cost,
primarily domestic
carriers, mirrors the restructuring of other industries. Steel, auto,
telecommunications, coal, meatpacking, and others have been divided in the
last couple decades into sectors with bigger unionized companies, often
using older technologies, and smaller, unorganized ones using newer
technologies.
But the new low-cost sector is usually not made up of just new
entrants: it's just as common for older companies to set up their own
low-cost, high-tech
subsidiaries or spin-offs.
That's been the case with the airlines' new regional carriers just
as it was with doublebreasting in trucking, the spin-off of auto-parts
companies from the Big Three, etc. In each case management, no matter the
industry, has demanded concessions by pleading the supposedly unique
challenges it faces from the new competition—and in almost every case union
officials have bought this logic and given in.
Such concessions have included giving up pension and health-care
benefits won long before. The media often sees the connections union
officials don't (or won't), most recently pointing out how pension
terminations at United and elsewhere in the air will likely spread to auto
and other industries.
(A particularly callous example of the older airlines' own low-cost
strategy is the layoff with no notice of almost 500 baggage handlers at
Alaska Airlines in
mid-May, and their replacement the very next shift with workers from
a subcontracted company. Needless to say, rather than mobilize workers to
block replacements from taking their jobs, the IAM simply filed suit and whined
about the company's not having warned them.)
Airline financiers
Another factor outside the industry that must be examined is the
role of finance capital. Mainstream stories about pension defaults or
contract terminations always mention creditors who demand labor costs be
cut if loans are to be provided or repayment delayed. The concessions deal
at US Airways was
described in the press as satisfying “terms of a new aircraft
financing deal with its biggest creditor.”
The supposedly evil or bungling airline managers are almost always
acting at the behest of the industry's biggest financial backers. They’re
talking about the
airlines' biggest sources of capital, outfits like GE Capital,
Boeing, Citigroup, JPMorganChase, BankOne, American Express—and even the
Disney Corporation! A story on US
Airways cuts, for instance, told how GE agreed to defer payments, and US
Airways was allowed to return planes leased from them, as part of letting the
company “restructure and operate more like a
low-cost airline.”
And in the just announced deal to merge US Airways with America
West, Airbus is providing a key part of the financing, in return for the
merged carrier's
agreement to use the new Airbus model—and, we will no doubt hear
soon, in return for more labor concessions to make sure the planes are paid
for.
The head of another big holder of US Airways debt, the Retirement
Systems of Alabama (the pension fund for Alabama public employees), said
explicitly that
workers had no choice but to accept concessions if the fund was
going to continue to back the airline.
The AMFA response to members' questions about the United tentative
agreement points out, by the way, that the company's final exit plan from
bankruptcy "has yet to be presented or approved by the financial
institutions" that will determine if UAL can exit bankruptcy,
which means there's no guarantee even more cuts won't be demanded.
Yet there have been no pickets by airline unions at GE Capital,
Citigroup, or any of the other financiers.
Given the involvement of these bankers in multiple
carriers' affairs, they present natural targets for cross-union,
cross-carrier protests (protests which could also appeal to unionized
Disney workers and
public employees in Alabama, among others). Nor have there been
pickets to demand the Feds' ATSB stop demanding management impose
concessions.
In fact, if airline workers sought allies against these financiers
they might be surprised at how far afield they'd find them. In recent years
mass protests
and even governmental overturns have swept Latin America, largely in
reaction to austerity imposed on the continents' workers by these same
banks and their
friends.
And ironically, one of the grievances of Latin American workers is that
they are being expected to pay for the wild overspending on useless
projects and
corporate expansion encouraged by the banks during the 1990s—an
exact parallel to the same over-lending and resulting over-expansion in the
U.S. airline industry in the 1990s.
(And lest this connection seem like too much of a stretch, remember
that the bosses have contracted-out mechanics' work to Central America,
representing the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Why then haven't the
unions made common cause in action with opponents of free-trade agreements
and fighters against globalization? Where are the links with Central American
unions?)
But the crisis facing airlines goes even deeper than any particular
“evil” bank, for they too are only playing out the drama acted out over and
over in the
capitalist system's long-term ups and downs. The roller coaster ride
not just in the airline industry but in steel, coal, auto,
telecommunications, and health care—and the restructuring and competitive pressures
in each—may have played out in each industry differently because of their
different structures, but
the common thread running through them is the long downturn of
profitability in the entire system.
In that sense the attacks this year and last on pensions at United
on the one hand, and Bush's attack on Social Security on the other, are
just part of the
same attempt by the ruling class to restore profitability to levels
of decades past. That is why trying to save jobs or benefits by saving
"our" company flies in the face of economic reality, and why instead
united labor action is essential.
Lack of a fightback
In this second wave of deregulation there have been many sporadic
mobilizations launched separately by unions at various carriers. There have
been occasional “work to rule” and no-overtime campaigns, in some
cases forcing management to back off, if only temporarily.
There have also been a handful of instances of actions organized by
ad hoc groups of rank and filers demonstrating the sentiment for unified
action. And
mechanics, pilots, flight attendants, and ground crews have all—at
least at one carrier and sometimes more—changed leaderships or shifted
union affiliation
out of dissatisfaction with concessions granted. But in no case have there been
coordinated campaigns for all unions at a carrier, much less industry-wide campaigns.
And for lack of this the sporadic actions have not encouraged members to
keep up a sustained fight.
Even the need to organize non-union carriers in order to stop
management from playing that tier of the industry off against workers in
the older tier has
been addressed only sporadically and only by individual unions.
There have been a handful of striking successes in recent years in
organizing both at older and newer carriers, but never an industry-wide,
multi-union campaign.
This is not to say that union officials don't talk tough. The day
before the tentative agreement was reached by AMFA at United the mechanics'
union and the Machinists were both reporting that their members were taking
home tools in case of a strike.
AMFA was also publicizing promises by unions internationally to support
them (including offering rides home should they be stranded); and had
posted on
the web a “Strike Resource Guide”—which actually was a how-to on
finding a new career should a strike drive United under! Posing the results
of a strike this way certainly wasn't designed to give members confidence in
the wisdom of rejecting the bosses' latest offer. The May 16 cave-in by AMFA leadership wasn’t surprising considering
its reaction to the cuts imposed by the same judge earlier in the year.
On Jan. 31 Wedoff imposed a “temporary” 9.8 percent pay cut and
reduced sick leave benefits effective Feb. 1 through May 31. The judge
decreed in his order “a reduction in rates of pay by 9.8% in all pay
factors for all longevity steps in all classifications; (ii) that all
employees will receive 75% of the pay they would normally receive for sick
days for absences of less than 16 consecutive days; and (iii) all scheduled
pay increases during the period are postponed.” Thus contract language as
the product of bargaining was
replaced by judicial dictate.
AMFA’s response was to demand that management “take the remaining
negotiating time seriously to help resolve major differences.” Said
National Director O.V. Delle-Femine: “Because the provisions of yesterday’s
1113e ruling are temporary, we do not plan to pursue a strike or other form
of self-help during this period.” (Self-help is Railway Labor Act jargon for
strikes and other job actions.)
Temporary or not, the smaller paychecks were very real to members,
and could have been the impetus for organized protests against them.
Imagine the support mechanics could have garnered by appealing to the entire
labor movement, asking their fellow unionists, “do you want a judge setting
your wages or benefits?” And if the
cuts were so “temporary,” then why couldn’t
members have been organized to take “temporary” extra-long breaks,
“temporary” sick days, etc.?
In addition to begging off a fight because the cuts were only
"temporary," AMFA leaders said they would turn their attention to
preserving pensions—ignoring the obvious negative impact that not fighting the
temporary cuts would have on the members' morale and their willingness to
mobilize to save pensions. In
contrast, a membership in action against the judge's order would have been
more able and willing to stop the pension attacks (and might have even given
management pause about carrying it through). The failure to organize any actions against the January cuts
was bad enough. What’s worse is that in the ensuing four months little was
done to mobilize members to ensure the “temporary” cuts didn’t become permanent—as
they now have.
Is AMFA Different?
Some had expected more from AMFA. Although it’s a craft union, its supporters
argue that given the bargaining structure set up by the Railway Labor Act since
the industry’s founding, all unions have functioned in essence as craft
unions. What had been seen as different about AMFA was its relative
openness and democracy, and its stronger line against concessions—a line
that now appears to have been mostly talk.
AMFA had successfully led mechanics out of the IAM at Northwest,
United, and at several smaller carriers, taking advantage of particular
sellouts to do so. One striking difference in AMFA’s functioning, and one counted
on by many to stop similar sell-outs, is the greater amount of information
about bargaining provided to members and especially the ability of rank-and-file
members to attend negotiations.
Ironically, AMFA won over mechanics in 2003 at United after
mechanics had rejected temporary wage cuts and other contract changes and a
court had imposed them as a result. Now the exact same thing has happened,
only
under AMFA leadership. And knowing what was happening in bargaining
wasn't enough for members to stop even AMFA officials from making overnight
decisions to go back to the table and work out new concessionary
agreements, as it did in May.
As democratic as AMFA may be, its leaders have not gone beyond the
ideology shared by all airline union leaders, the belief that in the
newly-competitive deregulated era unions must do all they can to save “our”
carrier.
The blame on "mismanagement" and the "bankruptcy
court process" shows why the AMFA leadership is no more militant than
that of the other unions. "Our" company can thrive, they believe,
if only we get rid of unique obstacles like a rotten CEO or judge or law.
They have no conception of (or at least no willingness to act on) the
industry-wide nature of the problem, or how the latter is just a symptom of
the class-wide attacks we've faced for the last 30 years.
Saving “our
airline”
Statements by union officials at all carriers, whether criticizing
or caving in to cuts, have "our" company's interests as the same
theme. The Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of
America (AFA-CWA or AFA) said it was giving United Airlines $131 million in
concessions “as part of the cost reductions required of all Unions and
management to attract bankruptcy exit financing.”
And the corollary of this theme is always the need for better,
smarter management: “We [AFA] demand that current management develop an
exit strategy from bankruptcy that does not destroy the hard-earned pensions
promised to us ... that would be one sacrifice too many.”
The AFA reaction to the termination of their pension plan was to
declare, in the words of Greg Davidowitch, head of the AFA-CWA United
section: “Flight attendants at United Airlines have put management on
notice: ‘either they go or we go.’" And: "This management has failed
at every turn during United's 29 months of bankruptcy and they still fail
to have a viable business plan. Management must understand that it cannot
run a service industry business while waging war on its employees," he
declared.
Davidowitch complained that "the bankruptcy court's decision
allowing United to dump its pension plans and its obligations to employees
was an enormous
disappointment to flight attendants who have made life-altering
sacrifices to help their airline." (Note the “their airline.”)
Randy Canale, president of IAM District 141, had also complained
that management’s turnaround plan relied solely on wage and benefit cuts:
"[The] decision will be a financial hammer blow for many of the 10,000
[union] retirees whose monthly checks will be cut to satisfy a business plan
that to date includes little more than harvesting employees' wages and
benefits."
Management must “look beyond labor costs.”
Union leaders have also tried to reconcile members to cuts by
promoting proudly the fact that they had voted for them, the AFA saying,
for instance, "you have determined today that these concessions will
be implemented with our input and influence.”
The AFA's "one sacrifice too many" line quoted above is
another constant refrain from union officials at all airlines: “this is the
last sacrifice, we’ve given
our share, now it’s management’s turn to save ‘our’ airline.” In
January, for instance, the IAM's General VP Robert Roach said, “US Airways
management must utilize the advantage our members have provided, not squander
it as they have done in the past. The company has everything it needs from
labor to succeed. The pressure is now on management to deliver.”
Another official said, “Let their decision end the debate about our
members’ commitment to US Airways.”
But why should management believe any particular sacrifice is the
last one? And why should they care how much members have sacrificed?
What's more, by demanding that management at each carrier develop its
own strategy to regain profitability, union officials are implicitly hoping
for success at "our" carrier against that of other carriers—regardless
of the consequences for workers there. In an oligopolistic industry in a
dog-eat-dog economic system only a handful of companies can survive; and
pleading with your own boss to be one of the "smart" ones who survives
(or looking for a new, "smarter" boss) doesn't do much for the
workers at either your airline or those elsewhere.
AMFA, which supporters tout as being uniquely anti-concessions, buys
right into this dog-eat-dog mentality. In answer to members' questions
about the
tentative agreement, they tell members their jobs depend on full
participation in the "Lean" program. This is a lean production,
labor-management cooperation set-up used by United Services, a United subsidiary
that is a subcontractor for 100 other airlines.
Says AMFA, "If Lean fails, the maintenance division of UAL
fails." So saving United mechanics' jobs means working harder and
cheaper than other airline workers. So much for the union that inspired
some radicals within it to argue all militant workers should follow its
path and form unions outside the AFL-CIO!
Of course, it's not just "bad" managers who are blamed.
AMFA officials are justifying their caving-in by blaming "bad judges"
and "bad laws." Delle-Femine said, "This is a sad day for
our membership at United, and it was perpetrated because of
mismanagement," and said the agreement was accepted for fear the judge
would impose worse terms.
Another AMFA official, Terry O'Rourke, said, "It's not something
to celebrate. We are under the coercion of the bankruptcy court process,
and we made the best of bad choices."
What's the
alternative?
Considering that pensions are at the heart of the current crisis, it's
ironic that an industry-wide solution available since the industry's
founding has never been widely considered. Despite being governed by the
same body of labor law, airline unions have never demanded the creation of
an industry-wide
pension system to parallel the Railroad Retirement Board, which
covers all railroad workers.
The IAM at United is right now demanding that rather than
terminating their pensions the company agree to transfer them to the unions'
own multi-employer pension plan; this certainly provides an opening for a discussion
of broader, industry-wide or economy-wide pension solutions.
Clearly, unions need an industry-wide forum for discussing
industry-wide problems. Unfortunately, to date the only proposal for
cross-carrier discussion on the crisis was on exactly the wrong track: in
January the IAM's Roach called for the U.S. Transportation Department to
“convene a summit meeting of management, labor and consumer groups to find
ways to help the struggling industry.”
Roach called on management, labor, and government to “work toward the
common goal of rebuilding the transportation industry for our mutual
benefit.”
What's needed instead is a meeting of all airline unions to develop
a strategy to resolve the crisis on workers’ terms: no terminated contracts
by judges; no
cuts to jobs, health care, or pensions; development of a plan to organize
the entire industry; and nationalization of airlines under workers'
control.
Even a single union putting its foot down at one carrier would have
a chance to appeal to brothers and sisters throughout the industry about
shared problems—and certainly airport-wide solidarity committees set up on
its behalf would be a natural venue for discussion of the issues raised
above.
That's not to say it would happen automatically; during the
widely-supported Eastern Airlines strike of 1989 the unions were never
shaken from their belief
that if only Lorenzo was replaced with a "better boss"—even
one demanding more concessions!—"our" airline could be saved. But
at least the discussion
could begin, and not just about why concessions don't pay, but also
about broader demands fit for the whole industry.
Workers already know on some levels that management's claims are
lies. For instance, a mechanic who sat in on US Airways negotiations told
the Associated Press in January, “They have made the bogey man out to be
fuel prices and weak revenue, so we offered them a loan to bridge
the current financial crisis. As soon as revenues increase or fuel costs go
down, we’d see
some payback.” And management’s refusal to consider alternative
strategies often leads to concessions contracts being rejected.
It's not at all uncommon for unionists to attempt to be reasonable
by offering concessions to management now in return for payback later. Of
course, when posed this way the payback never comes. But this argument could
just as easily be turned on its head: pointing to the flaws in management's
economic rationale for concessions, labor could demand to see the books of the
carriers—not just one, but all of them.
In joint meetings of all unions throughout the industry workers could
discuss the entire industry's costs and revenue, and figure out how to
reorganize the industry for their benefit and that of consumers, rather
than for the owners' profits.
This could be coupled with raising the demand for nationalization of
the airlines under workers' control. Given the repeated defeats suffered
recently,
raising this demand may seem unrealistic. But it could be a natural
part of a broader educational campaign on the real source of the troubles
at every carrier, which would have to get into the roots of the crisis in
the industry as well as the problems in the broader economy.
And the already semi-public nature of the industry is easy to
explain, not just because airlines are inevitably a concentrated industry,
but even more
directly because of the billions in government loans, tax breaks,
public subsidies, and publicly-financed airport infrastructure—and now the
use of taxpayer money for pensions—from which management has benefited
since the industry's founding.
The stakes for all
workers
Even if union officials haven't made the connection, the media has made
clear in countless feature stories the link between pension cuts at the
airlines and
similar cuts in other industries as well as cuts in health care,
both corporate-provided and government-provided. They've quoted many
corporate sources praising the trend in every industry away from defined-benefit
plans (which guarantee a specific amount in weekly checks) to defined
contribution plans
(also called 401Ks, in which the company pays into a savings account
that can go bust and leave you with less than you expected after
retirement—or even
nothing).
And they've coupled this praise with an endorsement of Bush’s
“ownership society” ideology, of shifting responsibility for old age and
sickness to the
individual. "People like to think of employers as social
welfare organizations, but they're not," a member of President Bush's
2001 Social Security Commission told The New York Times. "In an increasingly
competitive world, they don't have room to do much else but focus on the
competition."
The American Benefits Council, chief lobbyist for large corporations
on benefit issues in Washington, has demanded that workers rather than
bosses become primarily responsible for their own retirement and health
care: “Individuals ... should assume primary responsibility ... for their
own financial security."
This is the ideology behind pension cuts in both private industry
and the public sector, which has led to massive and militant mobilizations
by public sector
workers in California, New Jersey, and elsewhere.
It’s estimated that half the employers in the country offer no
retirement plan of any kind. And, of course, a similar trend is happening
in health care, where
private savings accounts, an exact parallel to defined contribution
plans, are being pushed. Even in traditional plans higher copays, premiums,
and
deductibles are more and more common. The latter have in fact been
the main issue in most strikes for the last few years.
The AFA is now fighting for Congressional legislation mandating a
six-month moratorium on pension-plan terminations and requiring companies
seeking to end their pension obligations to fully disclose executive compensation
plans. This union had earlier threatened CHAOS actions (Create Havoc Around
Our System), that is, job actions at unannounced times and places—threats
never carried out.
The proposed legislation would benefit all airline workers; why then
not have cross-union strategizing to launch CHAOS actions on behalf of this
legislation as well as for restoration of all pensions, jobs, wages, and
benefits cut?
And given the economy-wide attacks on pensions and health care just
discussed, why not appeal to other unions to join in these actions and to
meet to develop broader legislation protecting all workers' pensions and
health benefits?
Why not call a national labor march on Washington on behalf of all
workers' pensions, Social Security and right to health care?
It's still possible that AMFA members will reject the proposed
United contract and that the IAM won't reach an agreement or that if it
does its members will turn it down. AMFA has already pledged to respect
other unions' picket lines.
It's still possible that the fightback will begin during this round
of concessions—a round that is not going to end any time soon. If it does
airline workers and their allies will need to discuss the issues raised
here to avoid another heroic but doomed struggle like those of the past two
decades.
*Andrew Pollack was a reservations agent at Pan Am and member
of the Teamsters' Airline Division. He edited a rank-and-file airline
workers' newsletter, The Plane Truth, in the early 1990s.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Click here for info on how to subscribe to Socialist
Action newspaper.
|
