April 19 — It is now almost seven weeks since the Eastern strikers shut down Frank Lorenzo's airline. They have kept it shut as tight as a drum ever since. Every effort by the company to lie its way out of the complete shutdown and disrupt the splendid solidarity shown by the workers has fallen flat.
Especially inspiring is the way the AFL-CIO News in its April 1 issue documented the entire sordid, strikebreaking record of Lorenzo and his cohorts. And it is highly significant that the workers are getting tremendous support from many segments of the population, going far beyond the organized trade union movement.
The long list of supporting unions and the efforts each is making to render material and financial assistance is truly exemplary, going far beyond what has been seen in the last few years in terms of strike support solidarity. There is no question that this kind of assistance, representing solidarity among the workers, is of key significance. Anyone looking through the pages of the AFL-CIO News can only be heartened and encouraged by what self-help from the organized labor movement can do.
There should be no dismay in the ranks of the workers at the collapse of Peter Ueberroth's offer to buy Eastern Airlines. Of course, the thought of having got rid of Frank Lorenzo was enough to raise any worker's enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the shower of publicity around Ueberroth, in which he was depicted as some kind of Robin Hood or knight in shining armor fighting the workers' battle, should have made everyone highly suspicious with regard to his negotiating effort on behalf of his special group of Wall Street investors.
It is hard to regard as labor's Robin Hood a man who himself insisted on wresting $200 million in concessions from the workers, together with a five-year union contract.
Furthermore, his secret meeting with a key director of Texas Air, the parent company of Eastern, raises the possibility that he might have been a secret ally of Lorenzo, as the April 24 issue of Business Week hints.
There's not much to look forward to with the three other prospective buyers either: Carl Icahn (TWA), J. Pritzer (formerly of Braniff), and a yet undisclosed grouping said to be heavily involved with Pan Am.
By relying so heavily on differences among prospective purchasers, is not the union leadership taking unsustainable risks? After all, the old hard-cop-soft-cop syndrome has been a strategic device of the giant corporations for many, many years. It has been tried countless times. What is there in this particular situation which merits focusing so much attention on it, to the detriment of a broader outlook?
By this time, Lorenzo himself is a thoroughly discredited character, and even segments of the ruling class press have been openly critical of him. True, he is the most vicious of strikebreaking employers, but he does not measure up to the giants who tried to resist the great upsurge of the 1930s. He is no Tom Girdler of the steel industry, no Henry Ford (the elder) of the auto industry, nor a C.E. Wilson ("Electric Charley") of the electrical industry.
And he is no Sewell Avery, whose anti-unionism went to the point where the U.S. Army (it was during World War II) had to literally drag him out of the Montgomery Ward store after he resisted the results of an NLRB election.
All these strikebreakers differed from Lorenzo in one key respect. Each was a core leader in his industry. Lorenzo is not. He is a creation of the banks, particularly Chase Manhattan. He was sent in from the outside under the impact of the restructuring of U.S. industry in general and the airlines in particular. They put Lorenzo in and they can yank him out. They can also find someone just as bad to take his place.
It is the banks and the insurance companies that have been in the vanguard of the anti-labor restructuring drive of U.S. industry. This is a point well worth remembering. The banks are advisers; they advance the funds and they make the vital financial decisions.
It's not that they're more avaricious than the industry leaders themselves. It's that, insofar as they are not merged or integrated with industry, they serve a different function. The financial institutions initiated the restructuring in the airline industry, which began in the most unobtrusive manner possible under the Carter administration. The energetic and enthusiastic godfather of airline deregulation was Alfred E. Kahn, an appointee of President Carter.
The enormous danger that restructuring posed to the unions and to the public as a whole was not recognized at the time by the union movement. It was assumed that deregulation would mostly be concerned with such things as the price of airline tickets and interairline struggles over routes. It wasn't expected that competition among the airlines would fundamentally affect the wage level. However, under the guise of stirring competition, deregulation was used to open up an anti-labor offensive against the unions.
When the airlines were first deregulated, a few small benefits came to the public as a result of the initial surge in competition. As always, however, this soon resulted in the growth of monopolistic groups that swallowed up the smaller ones. The brunt of the reorganization and restructuring then fell directly on the workers.
At the present moment too much attention is focused on the proceedings in the bankruptcy court and the maneuvers among prospective buyers, and not enough on the next step the union must take in the struggle against the company.
The unions took a risk when they proposed that the bankruptcy judge appoint a trustee. The proper thing to do, once the unions were forced to participate in the bankruptcy proceedings, was to ask that the unions themselves become the trustee. The union members, by virtue of their indispensability to the operation of the company, and their pension funds and other moneys tied up in the company's assets, are the principal creditor.
Of course, the unions can by no means be indifferent to the prospective buyer of the airline, but it's an altogether different matter to steer their attention solely to that issue. The basic problem is the struggle between the company and the union, between labor and capital.
As matters stand now, the strike is solid and the airline is shut down tight. What has made the airline strike so effective is that the machinists were joined by both the pilots and the flight attendants. But additional sympathetic, overt support is needed to overcome the resistance of the bosses, or the momentum of the strike can fade. That was certainly the intention of George Bush when he spoke to 3,000 officials of the building trades unions yesterday. Unfortunately, a strategic section of the labor movement listened politely and applauded him, even as their sisters and brothers were on the picket lines.
The airlines unions must avoid the perception of a long, exhausting trench warfare against the company and its financial backers.
At other times and in other conditions this may be the best form of struggle available. But the restructuring efforts of avaricious capitalist industry are a new historical phenomenon and have created a new set of conditions. This is not the time for an isolated struggle by one union or even a group of unions against an employer.
The power of capital is concentrated. Their economic power is aided completely by the capitalist state — the courts, the government agencies, the administration. In a long, exhausting struggle of attrition, the financial and economic resources of the bosses and bankers exceed those of the workers. What is needed is the launching of a dynamic initiative that breaks away from the mold of the traditional, merely economic struggle.
There are other options still open. The unions can open up another front, a struggle of sympathy and support for the airline strikers. Nothing could be more significant than the active intervention of other unions, especially in the transportation and communications industries, in a sympathetic struggle that would affect additional airlines and other industries and bring the issue to a head.
Of course, this carries significant risks for the labor movement. But has the working class ever won a struggle where there were no significant risks? The Phelps-Dodge and Brown & Sharpe strikes showed that an attrition strategy can be pushed to the limits and still fail to bring success.
The unions must proceed from a passive, exhausting type of strategy to a dynamic one which will get the immediate attention of the other employers and of the government, especially when they see that the union is prepared to carry it through to a successful conclusion.
The present restructuring, called deregulation in the airline industry, poses the greatest menace to the U.S. working class. At the present moment, the strike enjoys the greatest amount of moral support. To be successful, it must go to the next stage.
What is the objective problem? Is it that the airline industry is in a slump and it's necessary to cut down? No, that's not true. The airline industry is still expanding. As a matter of fact, the April 18 Wall Street Journal shows that the key to airline expansion is the growth of the aircraft industry. Boeing Aircraft, for example, just got a $9-billion share of a $17-billion order for planes, which also goes to McDonnell Douglas and Fokker NV.
Is the problem the efficiency of the workers? No, that's not true either. The problem lies in the avaricious effort of the banks to push the restructuring at the expense of the workers. This happens in every industry, but nowhere do the banks have a greater say than in aircraft, airlines, aerospace and military production.
Note that the two people mentioned as possible court-appointed trustees in bankruptcy are George Shultz, former Secretary of State, and Frank Carlucci, former Secretary of Defense.
The intimate relationship of the banks, the government and the military shows that all the segments of the capitalist establishment are intertwined. Only a concerted offensive by the labor movement that goes beyond traditional self-help support of an economic and financial character can redress the relationship of forces between the capitalist class and the working class.
Last updated: 23 March 2018