Hard-Liner Negotiates for Pan Am

Many union representatives who have sat across the bargaining table from Raymond Grebey say the current mechanics’ strike against Pan American World Airways was almost inevitable because he is a hard-line negotiator who believes in a confrontational approach to labor relations.

Take the example of Marvin Miller, who was head of the Major League Baseball Players Assn. when Grebey represented team owners during the 1981 baseball strike.

Miller and his wife, Terry, were getting ready to fly from New York to Tokyo last month, and Terry called Pan Am to make their plane reservations.

“When I found out Pan Am had hired Ray (Grebey) as vice president for industrial relations and their union contracts were going to expire soon, I canceled our Pan Am reservations because I knew a strike was certain and that we’d never get to Tokyo on Pan Am,” Terry Miller said.

Marvin Miller, now retired as the ballplayers’ chief negotiator, said: “Terry as absolutely right. There was never any question in my mind (during the baseball strike) that Grebey was out to break the ballplayers’ union and, while he was acting on assignment from t he owners, it was an assignment he enjoyed: breaking unions.”

Out for Best Deal

Admirers of the hard-working, intelligent Grebey say his goal in life is not to break unions but to get the best deal he can for his employers--currently Pan Am. And both Grebey and other Pan Am executives deny, of course, that they are out to break the unions in this case.

But Grebey’s reputation as a hard-line, anti-union executive clearly hasn’t made bargaining talks easy, and the strike could have a profound effect on the entire industry if it isn’t settled quickly.

Former Secretary of Labor W.J. Usery, now a labor-relations consultant for Eastern Airlines, among other companies, said that, if the unions are broken at Pan Am, “all other airlines in the country are going to have to re-evaluate their own labor union contracts.”

Usery, who recently helped Eastern peacefully resolve its own labor troubles, said major airlines such as Eastern, American and others can compete successfully against cut-rate, low-wage airlines such as Continental and People Express because the smaller carriers are not a major factor in the market.

“But if a full-service company like Pan Am can get rid of some or all of its unions and push labor costs down dramatically, there is bound to be a domino effect on the rest of the major companies,” Usery said.

And to make matters worse for the union, they are quarreling badly among themselves. Pilots and flight engineers last week started crossing picket lines set up by the Transport Workers Union, which represents the mechanics. The mechanics themselves are seriously divided between moderates pressing to accept a lesser contract from management and militants holding out for more.

Pan Am will resume negotiations with the mechanics today for the first time since the walk out began Feb. 28. But even if those talks bring about an early agreement with the Transport workers, the company faces yet a strike threat by its flight attendants April 1.

That dispute could be even more difficult to resolve than the current one because management is demanding the right to use foreign workers on all flights originating outside the United States. That demand, if accepted by the flight attendants, could substantially undermine their wages because foreign workers earn far less than their U.S. counterparts.

Pan Am said it has already trained 800 workers to replace the flight attendants--a sign that management is going to follow a tough line. That and the battles within the mechanics’ union and among the five unions that represent Pan Am’s 19,000 workers give credence to Usery’s idea that the impact of the Pan Am strike may not be limited to that company alone.

Pan Am insists that it wants to arrive at an agreement with its unions, but it is making demands that some of the unions will find difficult--if not impossible--to accept.

Striking Pan Am mechanics, who earn about $28,000 a year, contrasted with the $36,000 paid to Trans World Airlines mechanics, joined other Pan Am workers two years ago in giving up pay hikes to help the loss-plagued company. Pan Am promised to restore the increases Jan 1, 1985.

But with Pan Am’s losses continuing--it estimates that it lost more than $1.4 billion between 1980 and 1984--the company refused to reinstate the wage increases and canceled its payments to the workers’ pension plan.

When the company offered, in effect, to restore to the mechanics their lost wage increases over a three-year period but, at the same time, demanded cut in health insurance, pensions and job security, the Pan Am strike began.

One of the heaviest blows suffered thus far by the mechanics was the decision by the pilots to return to their jobs after honoring the mechanics’ picket lines for six day.

Ironically, sources inside the Air Line Pilots Assn. say President Henry Duffy still believes strongly, as he said a year ago, that “union solidarity is essential” in the airline industry.

AFL-CIO spokesman Rex Hardesty said Francisco A. Lorenzo, chairman of Continental Airlines, “taught the pilots the meaning of the words union solidarity .”

When the mechanics struck Continental in September, 1983, the pilots continued to work. But when the company filed for Chapter 11 under the federal bankruptcy laws, all the Continental’s union contracts were abrogated, including that of the pilots.

The pilots walked out. The few who stayed on their jobs had to take pay cuts of up to 50%, and that dispute seemed to herald the beginning of a more militant union.

Leaders of the pilots’ union say now that, while they haven’t forgotten the need for solidarity, pilots are crossing the Pan Am mechanics’ picket lines because of some unusual circumstances.

For instance, there’s a fight within the mechanics union itself.

That battle broke into the open when one of the more militant union leaders, Melvyn Brackett, president of the Transport Workers’ powerful local at Kennedy Airport in New York, found out that TWU International Vice President John Kerrigan was ready to accept a compromise settlement that Pan Am management was apparently ready to offer. The feud escalated when many pilots sided with moderates in the mechanics’ union and decided to return to their jobs, expecting a quick end to the strike.

Moreover, sources in the pilots’ union insist that some leaders of the Transport Workers actually asked the pilots to return to work as a means of pressuring the more militant leaders and members of their own union to accept a compromise settlement with Pan Am.

Because of Pan Am’s economic troubles, Duffy, the pilots’ union president, had a hard time keeping Pan Am pilots from returning to work almost immediately after the mechanics’ strike began. However, when it became clear that the mechanics themselves were badly divided, and some were even asking the pilots to go back to work, Duffy no longer tried to keep the pilots out.

Duffy said he resents his union’s being labeled as a strikebreaking organization that is only interested in its won members’ welfare.

Pilots do make an average of more than $85,000 a year, but they have often respected picket lines of their lower-paid co-workers, he insisted.

It is true that, because of increasing competition between airline resulting from deregulation in the last few years, pilots have more often crossed picket lines of their co-workers and thus helped break other strikes.

But Duffy insists that, despite their actions at Pan Am and at Alaska Airlines, pilots still realize the “true meaning of union solidarity and we will practice it whenever possible.”

But, as is true in all other unionized industries, until airline workers actually unite their forces, they will be at a severe disadvantage in dealing with hard-line management.

Union Unity Growing

The Pan Am strike to the contrary, unity among unions in the United States is probablyas great or greater than it has been for decades.

The AFL-CIO did manage to unite its forces in the 1984 presidential election behind Walter F. Mondale, and it has drawn up an elaborate set of plans to bring about greater labor unity in the future through such things as cooperative union organizing drives and advertising campaigns in newspapers, radio and television to promote the values of unionism.

Less public attention is being paid, however, to similar efforts in Europe, but there, too, unions are trying, at least, to move toward greater cooperation.

Last year, West German metal workers engaged in a prolonged strike to win a 1 1/2-hour cut in their 40-hour workweek. While the unions there had set a 35-hour workweek as their goal, they regarded the reduction they did win as significant success. The cut in working hours in West Germany will become effective April 1.

Now, said Hans Mayr, president of the Geneva-based International Metal Workers’ Federation, the start made by the West Germans has become a goal of unions in all parts of Europe.

Another sign of the increased effort to promote interunion cooperation in Europe can be seen at Ford Motor Co. there. At a recent meeting in Geneva, unions representing Ford workers in Britain, West Germany, Belgium, Spain and Portugal pledged to support any strike action taken to stop any attempt by Ford to close down a major plant in Europe.

Ford employs 120,000 workers in Western Europe, mostly in Britain and West Germany, according to Herman Rebhan, general secretary of the federation, who said the Geneva session was called “to discuss common plans to support workers who may be threatened by plant closures.”

It wasn’t clear whether a union in one country has actually pledged to strike if Ford closes a major plant in another nation. But that is the goal, and Rebhan said a world conference of Ford workers and their unions, including the United Auto Workers in the United States, will meet later this year to try to further unify their force to combat plant shutdowns.