Combative Union Leader Praised, Vilified for Role

Charlie Bryan sees himself as the man who had a gun put to his head. Important people threatened him, important people cussed. A finger curled around the trigger. He would not flinch.

“So there is a very, very hostile feeling toward me over there,” Bryan said Wednesday, and he nodded in the direction of Eastern Airlines’ corporate headquarters a few miles down the road.

Of course, things were different just outside his door. At District 100 of the International Assn. of Machinists, where he is president, the folks were wearing “I’m Proud of Bryan” buttons.

“Charlie stood right up to all of them,” said one of the other union officials. “He’s got the guts.”

Charles E. Bryan, flinty and 52, these days is among the most loyally praised and deeply despised men in Miami. In the wee hours of Monday morning, his union was the lone holdout against the airline’s demand for a 20% cut in wages. Faced with a stalemate, Eastern’s board then reluctantly voted to accept a buy-out from Texas Air Corp.

Immediately afterward, top airline executives issued a statement blaming Bryan for the hurried sale. Stories were told of angry exchanges between Bryan and Frank Borman, Eastern’s chairman. Another tale had one of the airline’s senior vice presidents clenching his fist toward Bryan’s chin.

“I should have told him to go ahead and make my day,” Bryan recalled. “The guy’s a wimp if there ever was one.”

For the past two years, in a concession to labor, Bryan and three other union representatives have served as directors of the airline. Late Sunday night, according to Bryan, he was offered the vice chairmanship of the board.

“I thought that would be just a cosmetic gesture,” he said.

Instead, he proposed another idea. The machinists would accept a 15% pay cut on the condition that Borman resign. No way, the other directors said. In a somber, if tense, vote, Eastern was sold.

To Miami, this represented the climactic confrontation between two adversaries who have been making the headlines for years. One is Borman, the stern-faced ex-astronaut. The other is Bryan, a bulldog-tough former mechanic.

For five years, the two men have gone toe-to-toe. They have called each other pig-headed and liar and worse.

Started Off Friendly

“That’s Borman’s fault,” Bryan said Wednesday, weary from long weeks of strain. “He seems to enjoy this psychological warfare. Every year he postures and contrives an economic crisis to wrench labor sacrifices from the employees.”

The relationship was far friendlier when it began.

In 1971, Borman was a junior executive, new to the airline. Bryan was a newly elected union general chairman. For 15 years, he had been a line mechanic working on airplane engines, and he was star-struck when the man who had orbited the moon invited him to a dinner party.

“I got goose-bumps,” Bryan reflected. “I was sitting at the same table with someone who was a modern-day Christopher Columbus or Magellan. He told me what it was like sitting atop those rockets.”

Nine years later, Bryan had risen to the head of District 100, whose locals around the country have 40 contracts with 24 domestic and foreign carriers. And Eastern Airlines had fallen on hard times.

Each year, Borman--already the airline’s top man--asked the unions for wage concessions. And each year, there was something of a highly public bloodletting between management and labor.

The cameras always seemed to focus on Borman and Bryan.

To observers, the former astronaut seemed almost an evangelist, confident in his rightness. But the machinist was equally sincere, a scrappy working man who knew the numbers and spoke with common sense.

“I never liked the old idea of labor . . . identifying itself with the guy who got fired or got disciplined,” Bryan said. “I thought unions could be a vital force for productivity, suggesting how things could be done better. And if we could do that, we deserved to be a force in corporate decision-making.”

So each time Bryan agreed to a wage concession, he demanded more say-so in the future of the company. The unions bargained for a wage incentive plan that gave them voting stock. They demanded to have their own accounting firm look at the corporate books. They claimed seats on the board.

“We wanted to focus on running the company well, running it right,” said Bryan, who earns about $55,000 a year, about one-sixth of Borman’s salary.

Little Influence on Board

In 1984, union members flooded management with money-saving ideas. The suggestions saved the airline some $30 million, executives admitted. But that did not mean that Bryan--or the other union representatives--were considered champions in the board room.

“I didn’t have any persuasive influence on the board,” Bryan admitted.

In fact, he seemed to many of the directors to be something of a fanatic, sidestepping the urgent matters of wage scales to allege management blunders. “You never knew where he was coming from,” a director said. “It was like he’d just as soon see the airline go under.”

Bryan finds such criticism perplexing.

“It’s them that wouldn’t listen,” he said. “The money was there to be saved. It was just a matter of everyone looking where the real dollars were spent.”

Then he nodded again, gesturing toward an old adversary a few miles down the road.