March 20 — The strike of the Eastern Airlines workers is bound to exercise a truly profound influence on the entire course of the U.S. labor movement.
No strike in recent years has taken on such a momentous character as this one. By its scope and breadth, it has attracted the attention of millions upon millions of workers throughout the country, as well as abroad.
When, following Jesse Jackson's lead, Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York said that the eyes of the country are upon the workers of Eastern, he was not exaggerating one bit. It now remains for the labor movement to prepare itself in every way possible to widen and deepen the course of the struggle.
No one knows how long it will take, but there is a sense that a significant victory may at last be at hand if an aroused labor movement stands firm and strong, uninhibited by the wiles of the Bush administration and the courts.
At the moment it is the court battle which will be consuming a great deal of the interest of the union and all who are watching this strike. It is important not to be misled by the legal proceedings in bankruptcy court.
Modern bankruptcy and reorganization procedures, especially by large corporations, are calculated to mystify and confuse the public in general, and the workers from the bankrupt corporation in particular.
For hundreds of years the term bankruptcy has been identified correctly with fraud, deceit, depletion of assets, diversion of funds, stealing, robbery and criminality.
Poor people who fell into debt got the harshest punishment with long prison terms. But the modern corporate giants have found an easy route to avoid the penalties that are meted out to the poor.
It is not by accident that law firms specializing in bankruptcy and reorganization constitute one of the most lucrative elements of the legal profession. These Wall Street law firms with their allies and clients among the biggest bankers, industrialists and the government have turned bankruptcy and reorganization into a minor industry, which thrives not only during periods of capitalist recession but during periods of capitalist prosperity as well.
An examination of any of the old railroad reorganizations would show how the bankruptcy attorneys drew some of the fattest retainers precisely because they were in cahoots with the railroad magnates themselves. However, the bankruptcy and reorganization attorneys are not the problem, they are merely one of its effects.
The problem is the giant corporate monsters themselves that employ the bankruptcy and reorganization route not just to defraud creditors but to criminally assault the workers and deprive them of their rights as well as their livelihood.
According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, a bankrupt is defined as "[2a] a person who to avoid payment, harbors debts, secretes himself, flees the country, or defrauds or simply avoids his creditors and is in consequence legally a criminal."
This definition fits Frank Lorenzo perfectly. No, he does not secrete himself, he just keeps himself aloof and away from meeting the just demands of the unions. He hasn't fled the country but he is defrauding his principal creditor — the workers.
The job rights of the workers constitute a property right in the company, as Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor under Roosevelt, defined the job rights of workers in the 1930s. The workers have a property right in their respective companies as a result of their employment.
Depriving workers of their property right puts Lorenzo in the position of being a criminal as defined by Webster. It is his past conduct that reinforces the nature of his criminality. He's not the poor man who has stolen a loaf of bread for his family, but his bankruptcy declaration is meant to break the back of the workers. That's where his criminality stems from.
There should be no mystery about the nature of the legal proceedings in the bankruptcy courts if certain fundamentals are kept in mind. There are two types of bankruptcy proceedings. One is involuntary bankruptcy, where a given corporation is thrown into bankruptcy by its creditors against the will of the corporation. The other is voluntary bankruptcy. That's where the owners or chief executives of a corporation voluntarilyy file a petition asking the court to protect the corporation against its creditors and demand time from the court to reorganize to suit the owners. This is what Lorenzo has done.
During this time, approximately 120 days according to present law, the corporation submits a plan showing how it can successfully reorganize and pay all its obligations. The court can then appoint a trustee to manage the corporation in the meantime. But Lorenzo doesn't want to submit to a trusteeship.
What Lorenzo has demanded in this case is for the court to appoint an examiner to look over the company's plans. Lorenzo would continue to run the company more or less as he saw fit until his plan of reorganization had been accepted by the court. But a stop would be put to the payment of interest and indebtedness by the company.
Assuming that Lorenzo's petition to appoint an examiner is denied (and it should be, because it is such a flagrant, arrogant demand), there remains the question of who would be the trustee.
As Secretary Perkins long ago pointed out, the workers have an overriding property right in a corporation. If the company voluntarily throws itself into bankruptcy, the union then has the right to be appointed trustee, since it is the principal creditor and its rights supersede the rights of all other creditors.
The creditors are divided by law into two groups — the secured and the unsecured creditors. All workers buying a car on time know that the bank can repossess the car for lack of due payment, most of the time without any notice. It is the same with airplanes. The mortgagees or the owners have the right to repossess them on the basis of nonpayment just as an auto finance company does.
Once bankruptcy has been declared, however, they are forbidden to do that, and the question reduces itself to who among the so-called unsecured creditors — including the banks, finance companies and the union — will run the company. The union can demonstrate that the banks cannot and will not run the company. They can only do so if they get the consent of the union.
The giant corporations which choose voluntary bankruptcy and reorganization should be distinguished from the great multitude of entrepreneurs, small businessmen and individuals who avail themselves of the bankruptcy provisions of the law. For the latter it is a matter of redress from insupportable debts.
During periods of capitalist prosperity small businesses grow like mushrooms during the rain. They just as quickly disappear as soon as a capitalist recession begins to unfold. The mortality rate of small businesses and the number of bankruptcy petitions filed by them is staggering. The bankruptcy law was originally designed to give them some relief. This is to be distinguished from the large giant corporations for whom bankruptcy and reorganization are a means to undo the minor ones in times of crisis.
Objectively, what we are seeing is the acceleration of the concentration of capital and the ruination of the small enterprises, who are either swallowed up or dissolved into even smaller units.
The bankruptcy court is a court like any other. Lorenzo's petition for bankruptcy should have been denied immediately offhand, on the elementary equity principle of law which says that whoever demands relief from a court of general jurisdiction must come to court with clean hands.
Lorenzo's hands are far from clean; they are bloodied. He criminally broke the strike of the Continental workers by filing for bankruptcy when he had no other reason for doing so than to get the court's approval to break the union.
Much water has passed under the bridge since then. Because of the magnitude of Lorenzo's crime against the Continental workers, millions of workers and hundreds of unions fought to get the attention of Congress. The law was finally amended to make it illegal to utilize the bankruptcy court for strike breaking purposes.
For Lorenzo to go to the court a second time should outrage the conscience of every progressive person. If he wins, it means giving the corporate barons a green light to continue to perpetrate this crime upon the working class community.
The first thrust of the labor movement should be to turn the legal proceedings into an arena of confrontation between capital and labor, between the working class and the capitalist class.
There should be no mystery about the nature of the legal proceedings in the bankruptcy courts if certain fundamentals are kept in mind that can make short shrift of the long, exhausting and mostly incomprehensible legal rigmarole which only operates to demoralize the workers and not to enlighten them.
What is needed at the court are huge solidarity demonstrations.
This doesn't mean to neglect presenting the union's case, or not taking the initiative to be appointed the legal trustee to operate and manage the firm on behalf of the workers.
The stronger the support for the union among the workers, the easier it will be for the court to understand the need to dismiss Lorenzo's petition and to appoint the union to take over the company. It is the workers, after all, who have been operating and administering the company. This is a splendid opportunity to demonstrate to the whole world that it can and will be done.
But this leaves open another route which is bound to consume a lot of attention from the public in general and the labor movement in particular — federal intervention by the Bush administration. This has taken the form of urging the Bush administration to appoint an emergency board to examine the Eastern Airlines strike and to issue recommendations for terms of settlement. Bush has declined to do so and Congressional efforts are being made to enact a law compelling Bush to appoint such a board.
Once a board is appointed, the strike would be ended until the terms of settlement were named. This second route seems a lot more acceptable to many, but it is fraught with difficulties and dangers.
The emergency board is picked by the president, who by this time is well known for his antiunion bias. George Bush is even opposed to a measly minimum wage increase and has been for a decade.
But, assuming he does appoint a board, there is no obligation on him to choose a majority of pro-labor members, nor even anyone sympathetic to the demands of the workers. Nor are the recommendations the board makes binding.
The link between the giant industrial companies and the capitalist state has never been more dramatically illustrated than in this particular bankruptcy and reorganization maneuver by Eastern Airlines.
The association is so flagrant, so open, that even the Wall Street Journal felt obligated to take note of the links between the government and Texas Air, Eastern's parent company.
The third route is by far the most reliable and the one that will ultimately bring victory. That is to widen and deepen the support among the workers, especially in the field of transportation.
Workers have a fundamental human right to demonstrate their solidarity with other workers, especially where their own living standards are endangered. The prohibition against sympathy strikes is an unconstitutional violation of the inalienable right of the workers to strike. It's a violation of the 13th Amendment which abolishes involuntary servitude. As long as the right to strike is limited at the will of the capitalist courts, involuntary servitude is being maintained.
The right to strike was won not as a result of legislation. It was won as the result of struggle. The legislation was the effect of the struggle, and not vice versa. It took many decades to pass the Norris-LaGuardia anti-strikebreaking law that prohibits the federal courts from issuing injunctions in a labor dispute.
The time has now ripened to abolish the right of courts to issue injunctions against sympathy strikes.
At the present moment, a most urgent necessity is to demonstrate the solidarity of the workers' movement and particularly in the strategic transportation industry, by validating the right to a sympathy strike, which incidentally is legal in almost all other leading capitalist countries but is still banned in the U.S.
It was mass action that nullified the bans against sympathy strikes in the leading capitalist countries. Only later were the laws changed to reflect this.
The task calls for united labor action. It is wrong to divert the energies of the unions and of the workers into legal and governmental channels which have only limited value to the workers.
What has been distinctly significant in this strike is the solidarity that has been shown first within the Machinists themselves, and secondly by the pilots. The next thing is to enlist other segments of the labor movement, beginning with those who are more directly affected by it — all forms of transportation.
The government will get the message quickly. It is only the action of the workers that commands the attention of the government. Just one incident that illuminates the significance of mass action can be truly educational.
Frank Lorenzo was due to get an award for his statesmanship in labor and management relations at Columbia University. Unbelievable as it sounds, no amount of reasoning, no amount of argument would change the opinion of the award givers. But mass action quickly turned it into something else. Not only was the award canceled, but many of the students and workers at Columbia turned out to support the Eastern workers.
This small incident illustrates the significance of mass action, of the awakening of the labor movement.
Last updated: 23 March 2018