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AMFA Stands Up Against Concessions at Northwest Airlines
by Andrew Pollack / November 2005 issue of Socialist Action
newspaper
On
Oct. 14, almost two months into their strike against Northwest Airlines,
the officers of the
Aircraft
Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) agreed to let members vote on a new
offer from management. AMFA
officials said there was nothing good in the offer, and in fact it was so
horrendous it’s likely they were being sincere when they said that
presenting it for a vote was not a sell-out but rather a chance for the
members to tell the company that they remained united.
The
management proposal that initially forced a strike on Aug. 19 would have
preserved only 2750 mechanics’ jobs, with 26 weeks of severance pay for
those laid-off (and all cleaner jobs would have been cut). An offer made a month into the strike
would have preserved only 1080 mechanics’ jobs with 16 weeks of severance
for the rest. The offer that would have been
put
to a vote this month offered only 500 jobs and four weeks of severance!
As
it turns out, the vote will not be held anyway: At the last minute
management inserted new language in the proposed agreement governing
interaction between returning union members and scabs, and AMFA correctly
cancelled the vote.
In
addition to job cuts, management’s pre-strike offer included a 26 percent
wage cut and the replacement of defined benefit pensions with a 401K plan.
Management spent millions training not only scab mechanics but flight
attendants as well, in case the latter walked
out
in sympathy. On Sept. 13 Northwest declared scab mechanic would permanently
replace strikers.
Support
for the strikers has been woefully inadequate—at Northwest itself, among
airline unions at other carriers, and from the broader labor movement. But
the cancelled vote, and Northwest’s acceleration of scab hiring, may force
the strikers to regroup and step up solidarity efforts. The union has hired
Corporate Campaign, which may be useful for
purposes
of researching and exposing the bosses’ financial lies and misdeeds. But
solidarity in action is the real need now.
Northwest exploits divisions in labor
From
the beginning of the strike, officials of other unions—from the
International Association of Machinists (IAM) and Air Line Pilots’
Association (ALPA) at Northwest, to the heads of the AFL-CIO—have denied
AMFA support, claiming it was a breakaway union that had raided IAM locals.
It’s
not surprising that IAM officials showed no support for AMFA strikers.
Unfortunately, they tried to cover their backstabbing with
misrepresentations of AMFA’s bargaining approach, claiming—incorrectly—that
AMFA was trying to shift portions of the billions in cuts the bosses wanted
onto other unions on the property. But in fact, AMFA repeatedly pointed out
how all unions were in the fight together, and AMFA negotiator Jeff Mathews
warned that “some groups, including the IAM, may be asked to shoulder a
disproportionately larger share of the new target amount.”
Northwest
flight attendants and officials of their Professional Flight Attendants
Association, themselves having broken away from the Teamsters over the same
kind of poor service that impelled AMFA to split from the IAM, were more
supportive verbally. But despite widespread sympathy for the strikers,
knowing they were next, flight attendants didn’t feel able to stand
alone
with AMFA and narrowly rejected going out in sympathy.
Naturally,
Northwest management used the division between unions as a chance to step
up its attack on other workers on the property. On Sept. 14 it filed for
bankruptcy, asking a bankruptcy court judge to let it void all its union
contracts and threatening to dump its pension obligations on the PBGC. The
following week, management announced it would lay off 1400 flight
attendants (out of 8500 working on May 31) and 400 pilots by January.
Northwest
also announced it would use more locally hired, non-union flight attendants
on overseas flights and on domestic flights on planes with fewer than 100
seats.
The
broadened assault has not yet led to company-wide solidarity, with each
union leadership still trying to cut its own best of the worst deal. Not
only will this go-it-alone bargaining style prove fruitless at the one
carrier, but it will accelerate the most recent
phase
of the decades-long spiral that in the last year saw massive cuts at United
and USAir, who also used the bankruptcy ploy.
Lack of solidarity at the top
This
is a moment of crisis in the labor movement, symbolized by a pointless
split coming after decades of disorganized retreats. Yet top labor leaders
are repeating the same mistakes made in the PATCO strike of 1981, which,
along with the 1979 concessions at Chrysler, set off a tidal wave of
takeback demands by bosses throughout the economy.
As
they did with PATCO, union “leaders” are finding special reasons to label
AMFA as not deserving of support. Said AFL-CIO head John Sweeney: “We don’t
think the strategy of this so-called union is the right one to achieve a
contract. To undertake a strike without resources or a plan … it’s the
workers who wind up making the sacrifice.”
PATCO,
they said at the time, was too high paying and politically conservative;
AMFA is a raider and outside the Federation.
An
internal pre-strike memo circulated within the AFL-CIO stated, “If there is
a strike, AMFA may ask CLCs [Central Labor Councils] and State Feds for
support: food banks, money, turnout at AMFA picket lines and at rallies
etc. State Feds and CLCs should not provide AMFA with such support, unless
the national AFL-CIO instructs them to do so.”
Furthermore,
all requests to honor pickets were to be referred to ALPA and the IAM.
The
defection of members from the IAM to AMFA—caused first and foremost by the
former’s repeated sell-outs—is only one reason for union officials’
hostility. The other is AMFA’s refusal on many (but not all) occasions to
surrender as easily as other unions.
As
we wrote in the June 2005 issue of Socialist Action, describing concessions
at United and USAir, other unions have repeated today’s bureaucratic
mantra, that members’ only hope was to surrender so as to save “our” boss.
Thus one official, quoted anonymously on Jonathan Tasini’s “Working Life”
blog, claimed “They [AMFA] are getting their just deserts.
These
are a bunch of idiots. Everyone else in the industry bellied up to the bar
to help these companies survive.”
Whatever
union militants may think of the wisdom of AMFA’s course of independent
craft unionism—as opposed to fighting within the IAM and among airline
unions in general for a more democratic, fighting approach—we must stand
squarely on their side. Their refusal to
knuckle
under should be seen as an inspiration for all workers seeking to halt the
downward slide in our rights and living and working conditions.
But
most union leaders have more important concerns. They want to avoid the embarrassment coming their way if AMFA
succeeds in even partially fending off
management’s
attacks, in which case they would have to explain to their members why they
couldn’t have done the same. And they’re annoyed by any challenge to their
thoroughly ingrained belief that the fate of the members is completely
dependent on the good fortunes
of
the company.
Honorable
exceptions
Despite
the lack of adequate support, the strikers’ morale and determination have
stayed high, and very few have crossed the picket line. The union has held
rallies and fundraisers and sought to expose safety violations by
management through press work and community forums.
Early
on in the strike, the union exposed (and a handful of media reported) the
reassignment of an FAA inspector who refused to obey his bosses’ directives
to go easy on Northwest safety violations.
Rank
and filers from other unions have done what they can to counter official
apathy. Small but significant numbers of IAM baggage handlers have been
respecting picket lines. The PFAA has publicized and participated in AMFA
rallies and has said it will defend the right
of
individual workers who refuse to cross picket lines.
AFSCME
Local 3800, representing clerical workers at the University of Minnesota
(now in negotiations themselves), has brought members to strike-support
actions. And vibrant, large community-support groups are active in the
carrier’s main hubs in the Twin Cities and Detroit.
The
International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the Aircraft Engineers
International, the Professional Airways Systems Specialists (representing
FAA inspectors), the newly-formed Minnesota Change to Win Coalition
(including state affiliates of SEIU, Teamsters, UFCW, UNITE HERE, Laborers,
and the Carpenters), a handful of central labor councils, and
a
number of UAW locals have announced support for the strikers.
The
UAW international donated $880,000 in support. There has also been at least one display of the kind of power
that could turn the tide, when Teamster engineers and rail workers refused
to cross AMFA picket lines set up at the CSX rail yard in Toledo.
Ninety-five
percent of the yard’s Detroit-bound freight traffic was bottled up until a
court issued an
injunction
ordering the picket lines to come down.
In a column about the recent AFL-CIO split, labor historian Peter
Rachleff, a leader of the Twin Cities support committee and earlier a
leader of the solidarity movement with UFCW Local P-9, used the AMFA strike
as a telling example of union leaders’ failure to come up with new
approaches to any of labor’s ills.
Rachleff
wrote: “History suggests the best way to revive the labor movement is by
mobilizing around a specific group of workers who face the central issues
of the era. Such was the case with the great railroad strike of 1877, the
Pullman strike and boycott of 1894, the steel strike of 1919, the
Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike of 1934, the meatpacking strike of 1948, the
steelworkers’ strike of 1959, and others.
“Some local labor leaders and activists here in the
Twin
Cities, and in Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, and
elsewhere get it, and they have offered support and material assistance to
the NWA strikers.
“But
most of today’s labor leaders, especially at a national level, seem to be
studying different pages from the labor history books, pages which detail
the conflict between the Knights of Labor and the nascent AFL in the 1880s,
the conflict between the AFL and the
new
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the early 20th century, that
between the AFL and the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in
the 1930s and 1940s, the refusal of labor officialdom to support PATCO in
1981 and the Hormel strikers in 1985-86.
“In
these and similar situations unions crossed other unions’ picket lines,
encouraged the taking of striking workers’ jobs, and signed contracts which
undercut other unions. Here was—and is—the embodiment of the IWW’s scorn of
the AFL as the “American Separation of Labor.”
Rachleff
is entirely correct about what’s at stake for labor as a whole. We should
learn from the honorable examples of those who’ve stepped up to the plate
in support of AMFA strikers and spread solidarity as wide and as strong as
we can!
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