A Few Thoughts About Labor Day
The Airplane Geeks are off this week for the Labor Day holiday here in the States, but we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled show of news and zaniness next week. At least, I hope we will.
But since Max Flite asked us all to try and produce a short segment about something interesting, I thought I’d take a few minutes to speak about Labor Day itself, which might be a topic that some of you living outside the United States might find worth listening to, since many of you know very little about it. However, from what I’ve seen, most people living in the United States are also unfamiliar with the labor movement or unionism.
Labor Day was first celebrated here in the United States on September 5, 1882, in New York City. If you think back to America in the late 19th century, it was a time of much labor anger at tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and George Pullman. The Pullman railroad strike of 1894, in fact, transformed Labor Day from a local event into a national holiday following worker clashes with federal marshals that led to the death of a number of workers. President Grover Cleveland rushed the passage of Labor Day through our Congress to avoid, or at least to attempt to avoid, any of the additional upheavals like the 1886 Haymarket riots in Chicago that killed a number of police and workers.
In the labor movement in the United States, names like Sam Gompers and Eugene V. Debs were well known in the early 20th century, as were organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World. We called them the Wobblies, the AFL-CIO socialists, anarchists, well, the rise of unionism in general.
But let’s return to the present for now and maybe a few confessions about my own role in labor unions. I have a few, and for some of you, they may explain some of my opinions. My dad was a union plasterer in Chicago, and my grandfather was an early president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union in the early 1920s, when the stockyards were still in their heyday. If you’ve read Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, there’s a mention in there about my grandfather, Big John Kikulski, that I’m now particularly proud of, being a history buff. However, I’m certainly not the history buff my Airplane Geeks buddy David is, of course. I found the why behind the events of labor to be just as interesting as the events themselves.
But honestly, I didn’t start out terribly impressed or really even interested in unions, to tell you the truth; however, a kid in his
early 20s defines that, of course. My first exposure to unions came as a government employee when I worked for the FAA in the
early 1970s. I joined the infamous controllers’ union, PATCO— the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization —long before the 1981 strike. I eventually rose, or was kicked upstairs, some might say, to the role of president of our local at the Chicagoland control tower – Palwaukee Airport – where I worked, which is now Chicago Executive Airport just north of Chicago, O’Hare.
I found unions to be a great opportunity to interact with FAA management about working condition issues without fear of reprisal. They couldn’t do anything to us because we weren’t coming at them personally. We were talking to them as members of the Union. Now, prior to the union, you took your career in your hands if you said anything to anybody about anything, actually. So, management spent an inordinate amount of time bullying people, perhaps because they could. That didn’t end with PATCO, though.
Unions just helped bring a little balance to the constant arguments, which is really what unions were designed to do in the first place: create a balance of power between labor and management. Now it worked fairly well, as unions came to despise management, while management reciprocated with similar feelings towards the workers; however, it was balanced, no matter how you looked at it.
Now, of course, for those times when it wasn’t, most of us found out when a strike was called. A strike was labor’s way of withholding their services from management. It was used to help leverage a solution to a wage or a working condition, like a safety issue. In fact, this remains a persistent issue in the US mining industry, where we’ve had too many accidents.
Luckily for me, I was out of the FAA when PATCO called their illegal strike in 1981. Some people also will tell you that a strike isn’t illegal if you win. Unfortunately, in 1981, PATCO lost. They lost big time. The union was decertified a few months later, and 14,000 people lost their jobs. An interesting side note, though, when we talk about unions and PATCO and the people that lost their jobs. The current union, NATCA, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, appeared just a few years after PATCO disappeared, because all the problems the union had struck for in 1981 still existed. So maybe their hearts were in the right place. My next personal foray into unionism was as a member of the Airline Pilots Association at Midway Airlines.
It must have been the volunteer in me, but I have always found the interaction between labor and management fascinating, to the point where I really wanted to be a part of it. I took on the role as Secretary/Treasurer at our local council at Midway Airport, became the Communications Officer and even sat in on a few of the eye-opening contract bargaining sessions. We never had a strike at Midway Airlines, but we did have a couple of close calls, and those incidents demonstrated to me why, to this day, the aviation industry remains one of the most unionized industries in America.
Many of you under 40 probably have a strong distaste in your mouth when anyone even mentions the word unions these days. Well, we have a generation of Republican control of our American Congress to thank for that, good or bad. That’s just the way it worked out. Now that’s not, of course, to say that unions haven’t shot themselves in the foot many times. They’ve been slow to change with the times. In fact, so slow that American companies have sent hundreds of thousands of jobs abroad. Look at the US auto industry. It all comes down to money. Most of the time.
Workers tend to be on the front lines of wage and job cuts. I mean, just look at the pension issues, at United and Delta Air Lines. Those pilots worked their careers expecting to have a nest egg to live on, and management at both airlines pushed the responsibility for those pensions on the American taxpayer.
Look at the people at United Airlines for a minute. They watched management stuff their employee stock ownership plans into the toilet. They took huge salaries, benefits, and job cuts since 9/11. There were those pension shuffles I just mentioned to the employees. It’s all about cuts when times are bad, but none of it ever seems to come back to them when times are good. You know what? I’d be angry at management, too, which is part of the reason unions still exert considerable control over the airline industry, much to the chagrin of airline managers.
So will the labor movement ever return to those glory days when 10s of millions were proud members? I know it sounds crazy right now, but people were actually proud to show their union card to other people. In fact, if you came to our office here in Chicago, I still have one of my original ALPA cards hanging on the wall. Now, I honestly vacillate between loving and hating unions, perhaps because I try to be open-minded enough to consider the situations before I condemn or support either side. In the end, though, I hope you’ll leave today realizing that, to me, at least, unions are not the problem, nor are they the only problem.
Unions were created to bring balance to the workplace, a concept that many young people are unfamiliar with today. Let me leave you with this thought, though: if your boss told you that you would be working 12-hour days, Saturdays, and Sundays, possibly even through your vacation, would you even think to question their authority or their right to impose whatever work rules they want? Of course not, but in a time gone by, people didn’t simply turn the other cheek and take it; they pushed back.
How many of you working today would even think of that? Yeah, I thought so. But realize simply pushing back against the authoritarianism of an employer is not illegal. It’s your right, but you have to believe it is. Look at the world around you, ask yourself, why there seem to be so many bullies in the workplace, those bosses that we all complain about but never seem to be able to shake.
Part of the reason they exist is that no one stands up to them. Everyone fears for their job or their next promotion or their next raise, and that fear of reprisal, that’s just where management wants you. For the Airplane Geeks, I’m Rob Mark.
PS – Because this story was first written in 2010, a few of the references might appear a bit outdated today.
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