Four minutes after their strike began at 12:01am on February 15, American Airlines pilots were ordered back to work by President Clinton under an especially reactionary labour law, the Railway Labor Act (RLA).
This law authorises the President to order an end to strikes in the transport industries for a 60-day "cooling off" period. During the first 30 days, a board appointed by Clinton will formulate a settlement proposal to be discussed by American Airlines and the Airline Pilots Association (APA). If no agreement is reached, either the pilots will be allowed to restart their strike, or the "cooling off" period will be extended by Clinton, or the Congress will impose the presidential board's settlement on the workers.
The purpose of the RLA, enacted by President Calvin Coolidge and amended in 1934 to include airline workers, is to string out negotiations, tie up workers with restrictive regulations, sap the strength of the union, and to allow the capitalist politicians in Congress force a settlement.
The issue in this dispute is contracting out, which the airlines and other corporations have used to slash labour costs. Partly as a result, the airlines have posted huge profits recently. American Airlines alone cut costs by $USl billion in the last five years.
An article in Time magazine notes, "The profits are rolling in now because of a gritty, single-minded and profoundly painful campaign of cost cutting over the past five years in which airlines have done everything from 'outsourcing' ... plane cleaning and baggage handling, whacking travel agents' commissions, to laying off ticket agents, middle managers and mechanics, to shrinking passenger seats and eliminating meals.
"The airlines also asked for — and got — huge concessions from their employees to help them through hard times. But after all that effort, and just when they should be reaching that nice, cushiony air at 31,000 feet or so, the industry is running right smack into turbulence in the form of employees who are insisting on a share of the good fortune."
American Airlines plans to turn over more flights to its "commuter" subsidiary, American Eagle. American Eagles' pilots receive one-third of American Airlines pilots' wages, raising the question of job security for American Airlines pilots.
Last year, the APA leadership reached a tentative agreement with the company, "but a hard-line union contingent", reports Time, "working through the Internet, mobilised members to reject a contract offer blessed by the union's executive committee".
Clinton's excuse for using the RLA was that travellers would be inconvenienced over a holiday weekend and commerce would be disrupted. This was the first time a president has used the act against airline workers since President Lyndon Johnson unsuccessfully tried to use it against striking airline mechanics 30 years ago.
Laws outlawing strikes or weakening workers' organisations were, in the main, passed decades ago. Even the Wagoner Act of the 1930s which conceded for the first time that workers had the right to unionise, outlawed sit-down strikes.
Subsequent laws, including the Taft-Hartley bill adopted in the late 1940s and the Kennedy-Landrum-Griffin bill of the 1960s, gave judges the power to routinely forbid mass picketing, secondary boycotts, etc., and to use the police and national guard to smash strikes and herd strikebreakers.
For the past two decades these laws have increasingly been used to attack striking workers. Nothing so exposes the capitalist nature of the government and of the two main political parties than the naked use of state power to take the side of the corporations, as Clinton has done in this strike.
Workers are slowly learning this bitter lesson — thus the growing support for a new Labor Party in the US. The top leaders of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), the national union umbrella formation, apparently still haven't got the point, however.
Shortly after Clinton gave his strikebreaking order, vice-president Al Gore was meeting with the top committee of the AFL-CIO. He promised to honour all labour laws, implying that they are there to protect workers. Gore is for implementing these laws all right — against the American Airline pilots.
That the basic class-collaborationist course of the AFL-CIO has not changed under its "new leadership" is underscored by this acceptance of the Clinton order.
One of the reasons it has given for this capitulation is that the APA is not affiliated to the AFL-CIO. Such narrow-mindedness and cowardliness, so contrary to the basic union slogan of "an injury to one is an injury to all", is as despicable as it is predictable.