All workers employed in air service and maintenance.
Submitted on Fri, 08/19/2005 - 12:25am
HONOR AIRPORT WORKERS PICKET LINES! DON’T CROSS FOR THE BOSS!
SOLIDARITY WITH AIRCRAFT MECHANICS! NO MORE PATCO DEFEATS!
AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL!
The U.S. labor movement may be facing its most important test since the split in the AFL-CIO in July. Northwest Airlines has declared war on the Aircraft Mechanics and the Flight Attendants unions. The company has openly bragged that they're spending $100 million to hire and train 1,000 scab mechanics. Northwest crafted demands to force a strike: 50% cut in the workforce, 26% cut in pay, cut medical benefits by forcing workers to pay 20% of the premium and freeze the pensions for 15 years. Employers are stonewalling negotiations. The strike deadline is set for Friday August 19.
For workers it’s an easy choice in a struggle between a greedy employer and a labor union. Yet, the leadership of neither wing of the split in the AFL-CIO has stepped forward to offer support for the airline workers. This is a shame! Have they learned nothing from the devastating defeat of the PATCO strike 24 years ago? In 1981, officers of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers' union were hauled off to jail in handcuffs at the urging of President Reagan. Unions at airports crossed the PATCO picket lines. It wasn't their jobs or union, so they thought, that was on the chopping block. The misleadership of the AFL-CIO did nothing to mobilize labor to defend picket lines. Instead they cynically called on the public not to fly. The tragic result: a union in a key transport industry was broken and all workers have suffered from that defeat since. Organized labor is down to a low of 12%. Corporate robber barons and their flunkey judges rip up negotiated pensions with impunity. Nowadays, strikes are seen in baseball, but rarely by workers organizing to defend their interests.
Submitted on Tue, 08/16/2005 - 1:00pm
By Eric Lee - From www.labourstart.org:
Last week, in an extraordinary display of corporate bullying, the company which provides British Airways with its in-flight meals at Heathrow Airport sacked some 800 workers -- using a megaphone.
In response, baggage handlers at Heathrow -- members of the same union as the Gate Gourmet workers who had just lost their jobs -- walked off the job in solidarity. Within hours, the entire airport was essentially shut down, stranding thousands of passengers and costing millions of pounds.
And yet the company, the American-owned Gate Gourmet, refused to consider reinstating the sacked workers and negotiating a fair deal with the union.
According to some media reports yesterday, the company deliberately provoked its own employees in order to rid themselves of "troublemakers".
The dispute has captured the attention of the mass media in Britain and elsewhere, and has been covered extensively on LabourStart.
Now the workers have appealed through their union, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), and their global labour federations (the IUF and ITF), for your help.