Unions Look Like Winners in United Strike

In the often deceptive, posturing kind of world in which union and management negotiators operate, it is often difficult to tell who wins when disputes are settled.

At this point, it appears that United Airlines’ pilots have won a significant victory in their just-concluded monthlong strike. The assumption of victory is based on the strong evidence that management lost its key, albeit unstated, goal in the negotiations: to break the unions.

The Air Line Pilots Assn. and flight attendants who respected the pilots’ picket lines have charged that United’s aim was to eliminate the unions and drastically reduce wages and benefits to levels common among non-union airlines.

United denies their accusations. But the indication that the goal was on United’s “hidden agenda” was made fairly clear when the company rejected a federal mediator’s “back to work” proposal that would have given it almost everything it had sought in negotiations.

Such “hidden agendas” have long been part of the collective bargaining process, particularly when one side or the other wants something that it cannot legally demand or ever expect to win at the bargaining table.

In the United case, the two sides had agreed after just a week to compromise on a two-tier wage pact, the only unresolved contract issue. The company had demanded that pilots hired after the new contract was signed would permanently receive wages and benefits substantially below those of pilots already on the payroll. The compromise provided that the lower salaries would be in effect only for the first five years of employment and that the issue could be renegotiated when the new pact expired in 1988. That compromise gave rise to another issue--a “back to work” agreement--that kept the strike alive for three more weeks.

Management wanted, among other things, to give “super-seniority” to nearly 700 pilots hired to break the strike of its 5,000 regular pilots. It also said that it would not offer jobs to 566 United pilot trainees who had refused to cross the picket lines and would not promise that flight attendants who had respected the lines could return to their jobs. The company knew that, if the union accepted such proposals, it might be permanently crippled and unlikely to be able to call future strikes.

Several days before the strike was settled, the federal mediator’s “back to work” proposal was made, and, in a surprising move, the company rejected it--even though it appeared to satisfy most of its demands. The union, of course, also rejected it.

The strike ended Friday when the pilots agreed to return to work and let U.S. District Judge Nicholas Bua decide disputed issues contained in a lawsuit filed earlier by the union, which charged that United had engaged in unfair labor practices during the walkout. The flight attendants also released the pilots from their promise not to end the strike until United agreed to rehire all attendants. The attendants, like the pilots, expect to win on all of the “back to work” issues in the courts.

The pilots are expecting another major battle if Trans World Airlines is taken over by Texas Air Corp., headed by Francisco A. (Frank) Lorenzo, who eliminated all union contracts at his Continental Airlines when the company decided to reorganize under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

Asked about the United strike, one union official said that “we certainly did not win a glorious victory, but we still have a strong union to fight more battles we know are coming, such as those with TWA and some other airlines.”

John Leroy, a spokesman for the pilots union, said, however, that he believes “other airlines will learn a lesson from the United strike and not engage in the kind of open warfare United did with its employees.”

Labor and the Left

Several top union leaders here and in other parts of the nation are using this interval between political elections to stop what they fear is a serious effort by some Democrats to guide their party further to the political right.

Divisiveness within that party is nothing new. Will Rogers used to joke: “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.”

But more and more leading Democrats have been voting with President Reagan on a variety of issues, such as budget cuts and military spending, and many unionists say they see a trend developing that, if successful, could force organized labor out of the party that it has embraced for so many decades.

However, despite their complaints, unions have no real choice in the near future other than to pressure the Democratic Party not to stray from its traditional liberal position.

John F. Henning, head of the California AFL-CIO, says that California Democrats are generally still liberal but that a conservative trend is clear at the national level.

A couple of years ago, Henning suggested that the AFL-CIO give “serious consideration” to forming a Labor Party, but that idea was ridiculed as completely unfeasible by, among others, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland.

Later, Henning said he realized that “the labor movement is given to slow change, and the concept of a Labor Party is not going to come to pass easily. I deal in realities.”

But last week, in a speech given at a dinner sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America, the top California AFL-CIO leader sounded as though he has not abandoned his hope for a Labor Party in the United States.

He warned that organized labor may be falling into the “servitude of the one-party trap of national politics as many national Democratic politicians betray the party by crawling to the political center in the struggle between labor and its mortal enemies.”

He said he was “speaking of those Democrats who would subvert the government of Nicaragua or view with equanimity the murder of trade unionists in El Salvador or have allied themselves with the militarized foreign policy of the Reagan Administration while at the same time forgetting the traditional domestic liberalism of the Democratic Party.”

Among those Democrats he denounced for trying to move the party “too close to the philosophy of the Republicans” were Sens. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas and Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina.

William R. Robertson, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said the concept of a Labor Party might make sense “in theory” as a means of maintaining liberalism as a major force in the nation. But Robertson said the only practical political role of organized labor is “to keep pressure on the Democratic Party so that it heads in a left-liberal direction and acts as though it really is the party of working men and women.”

Murray Finley, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers of America, said in an interview here Monday that “there are those inside the Democratic Party who are misreading history and see the reelection of Reagan as a sign that the Democrats must move to the right if they want to regain power in Washington. I would not want to be part of such a party.”

Finley said that Republicans didn’t desert their conservative base when Democrat Lyndon Johnson overwhelmed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race and that “after that defeat they came back to elect Richard Nixon and now they have one of the most conservative Presidents in American history in the White House, Ronald Reagan.”

“Democrats will never win by trying to be as conservative as the Republicans. They can only succeed if they do not stray from their traditional goals of social justice,” he said.

And John J. Sweeney, president of the Service Employees International Union, said the lesson of the 1984 election was that “labor must lead in the restoration of traditional progressive policies in the Democratic Party.”

These days, he charged, the Democratic Party is “a party without values, without strong beliefs.”

In a talk to a California AFL-CIO conference in Sacramento, Sweeney said too many Democrats these days are saying that, “to regain prominence in this country, they need to be Republican clones. . . . That is hogwash and the worst form of political suicide for the Democratic Party.”

Labor’s effort to counter the conservative trend in the Democratic Party may not work, but at least more union leaders are starting to speak out in defense of the liberal goals that helped the liberal-labor alliance maintain power in Washington for so many years beginning with the triumphs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

National Strike Fund

Raoul Teilhet, who is retiring after 17 years as president of the California Federation of Teachers, is urging the 14-million-member AFL-CIO to set up a national multimillion-dollar strike fund “as a necessary first step to fight the new corporate union busting that is becoming so commonplace today.”

There was no immediate reaction from national AFL-CIO officers to the proposal made by Teilhet at his retirement dinner the other day.

But the union leader argued that a massive strike fund could be accumulated by the national labor federation, which has 96 affiliated unions. Such a fund, he said, would make it easier for workers of one union to respect picket lines of another striking union “and give a badly needed boost to the concept of worker solidarity at a time when unions are under such heavy attack by corporations and the Reagan Administration.”