Workers Vanguard No. 853	2 September 2005

Victory to Northwest AMFA Strike!

Unions: Shut Down Northwest!
Solidarity Action Can Win This One!

The strike by 4,400 Northwest Airlines mechanics and cleaners, members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA), is a crucial battle for every airline union and the entire labor movement. When the AMFA ranks walked out on August 20, the carrier set in motion a long-planned, massive operation to bust the union, bringing in more than 1,000 scab mechanics. Northwest has suffered from delays, cancellations and grounded planes, but it is far from crippled—a result of the outright treachery of the leaders of the other airline unions, which are scabbing on the strike. The capitalist media gloat about Northwest’s “brilliant” planning of the union-busting operation and what it portends for all airline unions and the rest of labor. But all their plans would go down the tubes if airline unions followed the elementary union watchwords: Picket lines mean don’t cross! One out, all out!

Northwest has thrown down the gauntlet to organized labor. Several AMFA members have aptly described the strike as a “war.” But as one striker in Detroit told Workers Vanguard, “We don’t have a battle plan.” The leadership of the AMFA craft union helped isolate the strike from the beginning with cocky assurances that their members were indispensable to the company and could win on their own. They didn’t even set up a strike fund before the strike. This is not surprising for a union that uses its dues to pay a law firm to run its affairs.

AMFA members don’t lack determination, but they can’t win alone!What’s needed first of all is for AMFA to call on the International Association of Machinists (IAM), the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) and the Professional Flight Attendants Association (PFAA) to stop scabbing and join the picket lines. There are already individuals fighting within those unions to do the right thing. Addressing a strike support rally in Minneapolis on August 27, Peggy Lubinski, who was fired for honoring AMFA picket lines, told her fellow flight attendants: “You need to walk!” An IAM baggage handler walking the picket line in Detroit told WV that he had been fighting for his union to stop scabbing.

To their credit, some Machinists, individually and in groups, have refused to do AMFA’s work. The Independent Pilots Association at UPS announced its refusal to handle Northwest cargo, and mechanics at KLM, one of Northwest’s alliance partners, are refusing to service Northwest planes. United labor action against Northwest could help lay the basis for one industrial union for all airline workers—from pilots and mechanics to baggage handlers, cleaners, flight attendants and customer service agents.

Northwest provoked the strike by insisting that AMFA accept the elimination of more than half its jobs, including outsourcing all facilities and ground-equipment maintenance and cleaning and custodial work, on top of a 26 percent cut in wages, higher health insurance premiums, reduced sick pay and a freeze on pensions. Overall, the company wants to squeeze $1.1 billion out of its workforce.

Airline unions have enormous social power—the world economy simply could not function without them. But instead of using that power, airline unions have been picked off one by one through devastating rounds of wage-slashing, pension-stealing and outright union-busting. It’s time to turn this around, and the recent strike at London’s Heathrow airport gave a taste of the solidarity in action needed to do that. Hundreds of British Airways (BA) ground staff walked out in solidarity with fired food-service workers. Airline operations were crippled for nearly a week, costing BA $70 million, and the airport was paralyzed for two days. The workers did this in the face of laws barring such solidarity strikes, showing the potential for tearing up anti-union laws through united labor action (see accompanying article).

Now, every union in the industry must do what’s necessary to ensure that AMFA is not defeated. As we wrote in WV No. 849 (27 May) when the United Airlines bosses ripped off their workers’ pensions:

“A hard-fought battle is necessary and could inspire a broader upsurge in class struggle—not fighting only assures greater misery in the future. The unions must make use of their weapons: their numbers, organization and collective muscle. The watchword should be: ‘One out, all out; shut down the airports!’ After all, the carriers cannot outsource everyone’s job. Further, the crisis in the industry is worldwide; airline workers would find allies among unionized labor at their companies overseas and among those workers in struggle at foreign carriers.”

Airline Unions Must Stand Together!

The history of the airline unions and the entire labor movement shows that when unions scab on each other, labor loses. This was seen all too clearly when the PATCO air traffic controllers union was smashed in 1981 by Republican president Ronald Reagan, implementing plans drawn up by the Democratic Carter administration. Responsibility for the defeat lay squarely with the leaders of the IAM, Teamsters and other unions who refused to honor the picket lines and shut down the airports. WV headlined: “Unchain Labor!” “For Solidarity Strikes with PATCO!” The smashing of PATCO laid the groundwork for a quarter-century of givebacks and union-busting. It also encouraged the capitalists to carry out broader attacks on working people and the poor, particularly the black population as well as immigrants.

Today the union tops are brazen in their backstabbing. IAM general vice president Robert Roach responded to AMFA’s request for solidarity from IAM ramp workers and customer service agents: “IAM members will not be duped into standing with AMFA.” The IAM local president in Detroit tried to put a spin on the scabbing by claiming it was better for his union to do the scab work than have an outside contractor do it!

Trying to justify such strikebreaking, the national AFL-CIO organizing director labeled AMFA a “renegade, raiding organization that is creating havoc in the airline industry,” adding, “It’s not in the house of labor.” It was the IAM misleaders’ pattern of agreeing to concession after concession that convinced mechanics at a number of carriers to leave the IAM for AMFA. Meanwhile, SEIU service employees head Andy Stern and his Change to Win Coalition haven’t done a thing to mobilize support for AMFA, utterly belying the speeches they made about revitalizing labor during their recent split from the AFL-CIO. The Teamsters, who are part of Stern’s coalition, are continuing to fuel Northwest aircraft in many locations and, with the exception of individual drivers, make deliveries to the airline.

The PFAA flight attendants, who are associated with AMFA, held a vote over whether to walk out in sympathy with AMFA. Northwest even assembled 1,500 scab flight attendants in fear of a solidarity strike. The PFAA tops declared that the vote failed, but they refused to reveal the results “for strategic reasons.” Many flight attendants who want a solidarity strike are walking the picket lines and calling for a new vote.

Officials representing the 300 AMFA-represented mechanics at Mesaba Airlines, which is partially owned by Northwest, voted for a sympathy strike. But AMFA leaders caved in to an anti-strike court injunction. The union tops take as a starting point the inviolability of the laws issued by this government, which acts as the executive committee for the U.S. capitalist ruling class as a whole against the working people. If laws hadn’t been broken and court injunctions defied, there would be no labor movement today.

The Bush administration, whose Labor Department secretary, Elaine Chao, is a former Northwest board member, gave a green light to Northwest to go ahead with its union-busting provocation against AMFA by not invoking the anti-union Railway Labor Act (RLA) to stop the strike. In March 2001, Bush turned to the RLA to prevent an AMFA strike against Northwest, when AMFA was in a better position to win. If this strike becomes effective, the government will use the RLA and everything else in its arsenal against the union. As it is, the RLA allows Northwest to hire the scabs as permanent replacements.

Some strikers have told WV that the cops are giving them a friendly thumbs up and have even acted to defend them against the scabherding Vance Security outfit. But if the picket lines were actually stopping the scabs, the cops and Vance thugs would act together against the union.

At the August 27 strike rally in Minneapolis, almost half of the speakers were Democratic politicians. The Bush White House makes no secret of its affiliation with big business, while the Democrats rely heavily on union support in elections. But when fundamental class issues are posed, the Democratic Party reveals itself as the other party of capitalist rule. It was the Democrat Clinton who invoked the RLA 14 times to ban potential rail and airline strikes, including a 1997 walkout by American Airlines pilots. And it was Minnesota Congressman James Oberstar, ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, who advised AMFA to try to avert the current strike by offering to take even deeper pay cuts than the company was asking for!

The answer is not simple trade unionism, but the fight to forge a new leadership of labor committed to mobilizing labor’s power independently of the bosses’ state and politicians. In his speech to the Minneapolis rally, AMFA Local 33 president Ted Ludwig quoted from Farrell Dobbs commenting on the Trotskyist-led 1934 Minneapolis citywide strikes that paved the way for organizing the Teamsters as a powerful national union: “The tinder of discontent begins to pile up. Any spark can light it and once lit the fire can spread rapidly.” We would point out that in assessing the historic 1934 strikes, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon noted in The History of American Trotskyism (1944):

“The modern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by the government at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were political people, inspired by political conceptions. The policy of the class struggle guided our comrades; they couldn’t be deceived and outmaneuvered, as so many strike leaders of that period were, by this mechanism of sabotage and destruction known as the National Labor Board and all its auxiliary setups….

“Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity.”

There is plenty of social tinder piling up in the U.S. today—over the bloody U.S. occupation of Iraq, over the massive cuts in health benefits, over the broad decline in living standards for working people. But for these discontents to be channeled into a fight against the capitalist exploiters requires the class-struggle policy laid out by Cannon, based on the political independence of the working class.

Gutting the Unions, Gutting Safety

The Northwest bosses threaten not only the livelihood of their workers but the very lives of their passengers. To cut costs, they are driving down wages and keeping old planes in the air—the world’s oldest commercial fleet—enforcing speedup and generally degrading safety standards. Since 2001, the company has already laid off half its experienced mechanics, sending the work to low-wage, non-union outside maintenance companies. Northwest has gone from one mechanic per aircraft in 1993 to one mechanic for every three aircraft today!

One day before the strike began, the nosegear of a Northwest plane landing in Guam collapsed. Now, Northwest’s strikebreaking is an even greater invitation to air disaster. The strike’s first day saw a four-tire blowout in Detroit. Three days into the strike, Northwest had accrued almost three times its normal level of “deferred maintenance items.” But the AMFA tops’ strategy of hoping that an accumulation of maintenance problems will lead to consumer pressure plays right into Northwest’s hands. As a result of mass layoffs throughout the industry in recent years, many scab mechanics have five to ten years of experience. And as long as the scabs are working, the union is losing.

The AMFA leaders, and many mechanics on the picket lines, combine their protests against the outsourcing of mechanics’ jobs with chauvinist statements against “illegal” immigrant workers and foreign mechanics in Latin America, China and Singapore, which is depicted in AMFA statements as a haven for terrorists. The AMFA tops buy right into the government’s phony “war on terror.” But as a striking cleaner in Detroit told WV, “The war on terror enslaves us all.” That’s right. The government’s “anti-terror” campaign is shredding the rights of immigrants, black people, trade unionists and all who could be seen as opponents of the racist capitalist profit system.

The basis for unity in struggle between the union and immigrant workers was displayed at the Minneapolis rally. Pointing to Northwest’s recruitment of desperate Somali immigrants as scab cleaners, Omar Jamal, spokesman for the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, said, “It’s nothing new to us that big corporations are taking advantage of immigrants” and called on everyone to respect the AMFA picket lines. Unions must fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to organize all the unorganized, citizen or not.

The America-first protectionism pushed by the union tops, which promotes the lie of a commonality of interests between the U.S. working class and its exploiters, is utterly suicidal in an industry that is inherently international in scope. The solidarity action by KLM workers is a welcome development and must be extended internationally to defeat Northwest’s strikebreaking.

Many AMFA strikers, and other workers as well, believe that the government and big corporations are on a drive to destroy the “middle class.” The notion of the “middle class” is used to hide the reality that there are two fundamental classes in capitalist society, the capitalists who own the means of production and the workers whose labor creates the capitalists’ profits. There certainly is a drive to destroy workers’ livelihoods, and class struggle is the only road to defending workers against this assault. But the direction the class struggle must take is toward the abolition of the irrational, profit-driven capitalist system—through a workers revolution that seizes the productive wealth of society and builds a planned collective economy in which production is geared to satisfy the needs of all, not the profits of a few. This perspective requires the forging of a workers party that, standing at the head of all the exploited and oppressed, fights for a workers government.

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A union strike fund has been established. Send donations to: AMFA National, Attn: NWA Strike Committee, 67 Water St., Suite 208A, Laconia, NH 03246.