By Kdog - Twin Cities IWW GMB Friday, Jun 16 2006 

In August 2005 the mechanics and cleaners at Northwest Airlines (NWA), the world’s fourth largest passenger airline went out on strike. The workers were rejecting the company’s final offer of massive concessions, including 53% job cuts, 26% wage reductions and sharp cuts to their benefits and pensions.

This battle is in response to a new round of attacks by the old large industrial corporations, such as the Airlines and Automakers against their heavily unionized and relatively better-off workers. Out-sourcing (reducing unionization), and sharp scaling back of pay, benefits, and pensions are the general thrust, part of their drive to make US workers more “competitive” with the rest of the world. The enormous power and prestige these brand name corporations have means these attacks set the tone and establish the trend for all class relations in the US. As the necessary norm for doing business in the global market.

Today’s unions for the most part accept the logic of the capitalist market and are completely out of practice of any kind of militant struggle. This poses the question how are workers going to be able to resist these attacks, and how are we as revolutionary anarchists and class partisans going to be able to best aid our sisters and brothers given our extremely limited size, resources, and influence? Let’s look at this strike and try and draw out some lessons so far.

By Peter Rachleff - Industrial Worker, December 2005

The Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association strike at Northwest Airlines offers a window into class relations and the state of the labor movement in the United States. What we can see through that window is very grim. As key sectors of the U.S. economy continue to struggle with overcapacity, workers are being forced to bear the burden by a ruling elite which is unwilling to give up its perquisites and privileges. The lion's share of productivity increases in the past two decades have gone to capital, while workers have faced wage cuts, higher health care costs, reduced benefits, disappeared pensions, rewritten work rules, and economic insecurity. Unions have been unable to mount an effective counteroffensive against this onslaught, let alone an effective defense.  

By Jon Bekken - Industrial Worker, October 2005

Northwest mechanics and cleaning crews remain solidly united as their strike against massive concessions that would cost most workers their jobs enters its second month. Unable to entice strikers to cross the picket lines, Northwest began hiring permanent replacements Sept. 13, and has contracted out nearly all of its cleaning work.

Delta and Northwest airlines filed for bankruptcy Sept. 14, after unions balked at the carriers' demands for another round of deep pay cuts, lay-offs and other concessions. While Northwest has said it will refuse to deal with the mechanics during the bankruptcy proceedings, this stance is illegal.

In the most recent round of contract talks, Northwest said it was willing to keep only 1,080 mechanics' jobs; most mechanics and all aircraft cleaner and custodian positions represented by the union would be outsourced, eliminating 3,181 positions that existed before the strike. Northwest had originally demanded "only" 2,000 lay-offs, so it is clearly feeling emboldened by the way other union workers have been waltzing across the mechanics' picket lines.

The following resolution was adopted by the Industrial Workers of the World General Assembly - September 4, 2005:

Northwest Airlines workers have been on strike since August 20, in a heroic fight against their employers' demands for concessions that would cost thousands of jobs, endanger public safety, and slash wages by 25 percent.

All workers in the air transport industry have a direct interest in turning back the airlines' insatiable demand for concessions, as do all workers in the United States who already suffer from declining wages and massive cuts to health care and other benefits.

However, the Northwest Airlines workers' struggle has been undercut by union scabbing by other Northwest unions, as well as scabbery by unionized air traffic controllers, catering staff and ground crews employed by other airlines and airports around the world but servicing Northwest flights.

The Industrial Workers of the World was formed 100 years ago to promote solidarity, rather than division, among workers.

Both the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations and the unions grouped in the Change to Win Coalition include in their affiliated unions tens of thousands of workers directly engaged in the air transport industry. Far from calling upon those members to act in solidarity with the Northwest strikers, each has directed their members to actively break the strike by crossing picket lines, handling struck work and otherwise assisting the employers, and have interfered with efforts by affiliated locals to lend aid to their fellow workers at Northwest in their time of need.

Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.

By Steve Zeltzer - September 5, 2005

NWA-AMFA striking mechanics were joined by hundreds of other other airline workers and other trade unionists at San Francisco International Airport on Labor Day 2005. Strike supporters including ILWU Local 10 president Trent Willis spoke at the rally and was joined with dozens of ILWU member from Local 10 and 34. Airline mechanics from American Airlines, United Airlines as well as flight attendants not only joined the rally but spoke in solidarity. Willis warned the rest of the labor movement that they should not fail to back the NWA mechanics because the same thing could happen to other unions. He also said that the unions had the power to shut the airport down and that might become a necessity.

JoAnne Kazemi, the SFO Base Representative of the Professional Flight Attendants Association PFAA which represents the thousands of NWA flight attendants reported that some strike supporters had been furloughed for supporting the picket line and that NWA was using scab flight attendants www.pfaa.com. She also said that NWA along was seeking to replace US based flight attendants on Asian flights with Asian flight attendents at lower standards and wages. This is already happened with the outsourcing of maintenance for NWA jets that are on routes to China. They will be serviced by non-union mechanics at wages substantially lower than US based wages. The issue of outsourcing was also raised by author and UAW-NWU 1981 Chair Jack Rasmus. Rasmus reported that over 8 million jobs have been outsourced in the last few years and many of these were good paying union jobs.

HONOR AIRPORT WORKERS PICKET LINES! DON’T CROSS FOR THE BOSS!

SOLIDARITY WITH AIRCRAFT MECHANICS! NO MORE PATCO DEFEATS!

AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL!

The U.S. labor movement may be facing its most important test since the split in the AFL-CIO in July. Northwest Airlines has declared war on the Aircraft Mechanics and the Flight Attendants unions. The company has openly bragged that they're spending $100 million to hire and train 1,000 scab mechanics. Northwest crafted demands to force a strike: 50% cut in the workforce, 26% cut in pay, cut medical benefits by forcing workers to pay 20% of the premium and freeze the pensions for 15 years. Employers are stonewalling negotiations. The strike deadline is set for Friday August 19.

For workers it’s an easy choice in a struggle between a greedy employer and a labor union. Yet, the leadership of neither wing of the split in the AFL-CIO has stepped forward to offer support for the airline workers. This is a shame! Have they learned nothing from the devastating defeat of the PATCO strike 24 years ago? In 1981, officers of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers' union were hauled off to jail in handcuffs at the urging of President Reagan. Unions at airports crossed the PATCO picket lines. It wasn't their jobs or union, so they thought, that was on the chopping block. The misleadership of the AFL-CIO did nothing to mobilize labor to defend picket lines. Instead they cynically called on the public not to fly. The tragic result: a union in a key transport industry was broken and all workers have suffered from that defeat since. Organized labor is down to a low of 12%. Corporate robber barons and their flunkey judges rip up negotiated pensions with impunity. Nowadays, strikes are seen in baseball, but rarely by workers organizing to defend their interests.

By Eric Lee - From www.labourstart.org:

Last week, in an extraordinary display of corporate bullying, the company which provides British Airways with its in-flight meals at Heathrow Airport sacked some 800 workers -- using a megaphone.

In response, baggage handlers at Heathrow -- members of the same union as the Gate Gourmet workers who had just lost their jobs -- walked off the job in solidarity. Within hours, the entire airport was essentially shut down, stranding thousands of passengers and costing millions of pounds.

And yet the company, the American-owned Gate Gourmet, refused to consider reinstating the sacked workers and negotiating a fair deal with the union.

According to some media reports yesterday, the company deliberately provoked its own employees in order to rid themselves of "troublemakers".

The dispute has captured the attention of the mass media in Britain and elsewhere, and has been covered extensively on LabourStart.

Now the workers have appealed through their union, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), and their global labour federations (the IUF and ITF), for your help.