Workers must fight for property rights
Concessions won't stop airline bankruptcies
By Michelle Quintus
Local Council 5 Representative
Association of Flight Attendants
New York City
It seems not a day goes by without some mention in the media
about trouble in the airline industry.
President George W. Bush's attempts to prohibit airport
security workers from organizing into unions, the rise in
airline CEO salaries while they claim loss of profits, the
mergers that neglect worker contracts, worker layoffs and
bankruptcies--all have become regular topics.
However, almost every bit of "news" regarding the airlines
rests on a myth: that labor is the cause of ongoing financial
struggles in the airlines--and that the workers had better
accept pay cuts and concessions or the airline companies will
be driven into bankruptcy.
Many airline workers at Pan Am, Continental, Eastern and TWA
survived bankruptcies. They know the truth: Worker concessions
never saved an airline.
Concessions from workers, bonuses for top
management
USAirways workers learned this recently when they accepted
concessions in pay and work rules, supposedly to save the
company from bankruptcy.
The airline had requested $950 million per year total in
cost savings from all its work groups. Still, USAirways filed
for Chapter 11 bankruptcy just days after reaching
concessionary agreements with its workers.
One week after USAirways' bankruptcy, the company asked the
courts to release $6 million for bonuses for approximately 500
senior management employees.
The reality in the airlines mirrors the reality in other
U.S. corporations like Enron and WorldCom: The corporate owners
are stealing more and more from workers' wages and retirement
funds.
Many airlines are doing this in the name of the Sept. 11
tragedy. But most of the airline financial struggles began long
before that.
United Airlines, for example, hasn't turned a profit in two
years. Management's solution is to point a finger at the
workers who keep the airline in the air. These same workers
actually own 55 percent of the company through Employee Stock
Option Plans, but they are denied basic decision-making power
over the airline's direction. Worker-owners are also denied the
profits generated by their own labor.
Gov't abets airline bosses
The U.S. government is also playing a role in the anti-labor
rhetoric.
The Bush administration established the Airline
Transportation Stabilization Board in September 2001 in the
name of bringing airline corporations financial relief through
government subsidies and loans. This so-called stabilization
board has given handouts to airline corporations--$807 million
each to United and American Airlines--without including any
relief for airline workers.
Now it has gone a step further by requiring worker
concessions at airlines seeking loans through the ATSB. These
demands for labor concessions convey the message that labor
costs are the airlines' primary problem.
In rebuttal, the Flight Attendants union at United Airlines
points out that an arbitrator recently ruled that United
enjoyed a $48-million advantage in its flight attendant costs
over the average of its competitors in 2001.
"The math doesn't add up," explained Greg Davidowitch,
president of the Flight Attendants at United Airlines, "when
management asks for exorbitant concessions from
workers--totaling $9 billion over six years--to obtain a
$1.8-billion loan guarantee from the Air Transportation
Stabilization Board. We ask: Is United using the ATSB as its
heavy to extract huge concessions from its workers to cover for
years of mismanagement? Or is the White House attempting to
dictate what airline workers in this country earn through the
ATSB?"
United Airlines was recently denied an ATSB loan until it
gets worker concessions. The bosses then presented labor groups
with a "cost recovery plan"-- and announced publicly that they
might file Chapter 11 bankruptcy by November 2002. The
corporation offers no management contribution to this plan, nor
any guarantee to workers that these concessions would avoid a
bankruptcy filing.
In fact, UAL has hired Jack Gallagher, attorney for Paul,
Hastings, Janofsky and Walker--a known union buster from the
days of Frank Lorenzo at Eastern Airlines--to assist it during
this process.
But union solidarity is strong at the airline. Leaders of
all unions at United Airlines have greed to participate in a
coordinated labor response to the financial dilemma. They are
meeting on Sept. 4 to discuss plans.
Ramie Miller, a United flight attendant who formerly worked
at Continental Airlines and who went through a Chapter 11
bankruptcy at that company, says: "I'm not afraid of
bankruptcy. Truth is, I can't live on anything less; there is
no room for us to give anything back.
"Continental used to ask us not to collect our welfare
checks in our uniform because it was an embarrassment to the
company. And cutting wages here [at UAL] puts us right back in
that position."
Workers are principal creditors
Bankruptcy may not be the end of the road for airline
workers. In the book "High Tech, Low Pay," Sam Marcy suggests
that bankruptcy may be the ideal time for workers to assert
their right as the principal creditors. After all, workers
routinely advance credit to the company by advancing labor
power for a period of time prior to getting paid.
"The unions," Marcy explained, "can insist on the right to
become the trustee in bankruptcy and to operate ... in the
interests of the workers. When a company files for bankruptcy,
it is no longer the legal owner; it surrenders its title. The
union(s) as the principal creditor of the company are,
therefore, the de facto owner on behalf of the workers."
Karl Marx also showed that the worker's status as a creditor
is not a fiction, but reality.
To be sure, the other creditors of airline companies,
including the banks, will not surrender their claim to
trusteeship without a struggle. But the right to a job is a
property right, accompanied by the right to seize and occupy
that property.
Airline workers need not remain victims to the mismanagement
and corporate exploitation that drives the industry into
bankruptcy and workers into concessions or unemployment. Worker
rights must be asserted in mass action and solidarity with each
other. In this way, labor is not the cause of airline financial
difficulties, but may, in fact, become the answer.
Reprinted from the Sept. 12, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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