NEWS ANALYSIS : Flight Attendants Test Tactics of Limited Strike

In the United States, the labor strike has become an anachronism, a pale ghost of the powerful weapon once wielded by the likes of union legends John L. Lewis and Jimmy Hoffa. Now, however, American Airlines’ flight attendants are trying to revive it.

The strike begun Thursday by the Assn. of Professional Flight Attendants was a bold and seemingly unprecedented move. Scheduled to last only until next Sunday, it was designed to disrupt the airline during its busiest period--as it has--while giving American little chance to train and hire strike-breaking replacements.

If the strike succeeds in wresting even a few bargaining chips from the grip of American Airlines Chairman Robert L. Crandall without costing union members too dearly, it could restore some of the potency sapped from organized labor over the past 15 years.

And though the tactic is especially suited to the transportation industry, it could provide a framework for other labor groups seeking innovative ways to apply pressure on employers.

Strikes planned to last only a limited time have not been used before by any nationally prominent union, say labor experts. And in the recent past, unlimited strikes have proven ineffective for many labor groups, with flight attendants taking the brunt of several faceoffs with the airline industry.

Employers took heart from the firing of striking air controllers in 1981 by President Reagan.

“That message reverberated throughout American industrial enterprise,” said Paul S. Dempsey, director of the transportation law program at the University of Denver. “In the airline industry, which already had been brutalized by the forces of deregulation, airlines responded by aggressively confronting labor to roll back wages and grant work-rule concessions.”

Since the air controllers’ strike, employers have made steady use of a 1938 court decision that allowed them to hire replacement workers.

Doing so, or threatening to do so, has proven a boon to all employers facing labor strife. And as management has strengthened its hand, striking unions’ victories have been slim--and often won at the cost of years of litigation and the sacrifice of many members’ jobs. By the end of the 1980s, the number of labor strikes had fallen to the lowest level since immediately after World War II.

Of course, success for American’s flight attendants is still uncertain. Much depends on the tenacity of Crandall and the solidarity of the 21,000 union members.

On Sunday, Crandall brushed aside an offer by the flight attendants to return to work immediately if the company would agree to mediation by a special presidential panel. With its flight schedule reduced by more than 60%, American is losing millions of dollars during the Thanksgiving Day week, which invariably sets records for single-day volume.

Airline industry analysts have speculated that Crandall is drawing a line in the sand, hoping that he can hold back demands from American’s pilots and machinists when they begin contract talks in the near future.

Even so, Crandall has taken a lower profile in this labor drama than colleagues before him. Beginning in 1983, when he put Continental Airlines into bankruptcy and vanquished its unions, Frank Lorenzo made no secret of his union-busting sentiments. The lengthy standoff between Lorenzo and Eastern Airlines’ unions, begun in early 1989, so weakened that carrier that it finally collapsed in January, 1991.

In between, Carl C. Icahn used replacement workers in a battle with Trans World Airlines flight attendants. Nearly two-thirds of 4,300 strikers lost their jobs in July, 1987, when TWA flight attendants ended a 16-month walkout.

In earlier strikes, replacement flight attendants, once certified, have become permanent employees and have not been displaced by returning strikers. Returning strikers have been hired on an as-needed basis. They regain seniority as the newly hired attendants drop to the bottom of the list.

The strategy of American’s flight attendants has been based on the theory that the carrier will not be able to replace many of its members within the strike’s 11-day span. Crandall has said that by the time the strikers return, he will have begun the downsizing the union rejected in contract talks. He vowed Sunday that there would be 4,000 fewer jobs for flight attendants.

After years of rancor between unions and the Reagan and George Bush administrations, labor hoped for a friendlier environment during the Clinton Administration. Those hopes were upset during the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now, unions and management are wondering whether Clinton’s victory on NAFTA will lead him to extend an olive branch to unions or continue to widen the gap.

Labor activists, however, say Clinton already has shown his stripes in the airline dispute: The Federal Aviation Administration granted a waiver allowing the company to train and certify replacement workers in 10 days, instead of the usual six-week course.

Yet Daniel J. B. Mitchell, a professor at Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, said it was not clear whether the FAA waiver was an expression of Clinton’s attitude or a routine bureaucratic decision.

The waiver means that American can put new trainees aboard aircraft possibly as early as Sunday night, though representatives of the flight attendants’ union doubt that the carrier’s training facilities can churn out more than 600 graduates in that time. The certifications also are restrictive, limiting the short-term graduates to service aboard only one class of aircraft, and likely prohibiting service on international or water-crossing flights.

The AFL-CIO has proposed legislation to place conditions on employers’ use of strikebreakers as permanent replacements. The proposal has drawn icy rejection from business, which sees it as weakening its hand. And organized labor apparently is so unsure of Clinton’s once-promised support for the legislation that it has allowed it to languish.

Although protection from replacement workers is at the top of its wish list, organized labor is not holding its breath. Even as management, academics and the media have been writing organized labor’s obituary, unions have been searching for a better tool than the strike, hoping to reverse diminishing power and membership.

Workers’ tactics have included enlisting a target company’s suppliers, bankers and customers to their side; staying on the job but effecting work slowdowns with “by the book” performance, and acting as whistle-blowers on possible violations of health, safety and environmental codes.

Though they are not as sharply focused as strikes, such campaigns have met with moderate success. Whether a limited-duration strike will fare as well remains to be seen.