Splintered unions get in step for mechanics September 6, 2005
BY JEWEL GOPWANI FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER David Sole planted his feet on two milk crates turned upside down Monday along Woodward Avenue. With a microphone in one hand and a picket sign in another, Sole had one message: "Make sure your local doesn't fly Northwest Air," said Sole, a 57-year-old chemist and president of UAW Local 2334, to hundreds of union workers and their families who walked past him during the Labor Day parade in Detroit. Although Sole is not among the 4,400 striking mechanics at Northwest Airlines, which has been operating with replacements since its union mechanics went on strike Aug. 20, he said he's tired of organized labor's tepid response to the strike. Closely watched in the airline industry and among other unions, the Northwest mechanics strike comes at a time when unions across metro Detroit are fighting off job and pay cuts. They're doing so against the backdrop of a splintered national labor movement. "Union solidarity is at a breaking point," said Dennis Sutton, vice president of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association Local 5. "It's either going to go one way or the other -- and AMFA is right in the middle of it." Northwest, Michigan's most important airline, carries more than 60% of passengers at Metro Airport. The financially strapped airline, which is losing $4 million a day and is expected to lose more than $1 billion this year, employs about 8,800 mostly unionized workers in Michigan, including about 900 mechanics and plane cleaners. Striking over a contract that would cut nearly half of its unionized mechanics and most of its plane cleaners, AMFA has spent the last two weeks on strike alone. No other Northwest union has joined the mechanics. Airport picket lines, designed by airport officials not to hinder traffic, are porous. Some mechanics, who had followed their jobs to Detroit, have headed home. As savings accounts start to dry up, some are searching for new jobs even as they picket. And union officials confirmed that at least one mechanic has crossed the picket line. So it helped the mechanics' resolve to learn that AMFA raised more than $2,000 for its strike fund during Monday's parade. It also helped to hear other union workers say they canceled their plans to fly on Northwest in support of the strike. "I felt a lot of pride," said Ruben Sosa, a 44-year-old striking Northwest mechanic from Taylor who put off taking a new job for a month so he could continue picketing. While slow to start, support is growing for AMFA, said Chris Kutalik, editor of Labor Notes, a monthly publication advocating changes to the labor movement. But in rounding up support, AMFA is in a sense fighting its past. The mechanics have been on their own since 1998, when they bitterly left another Northwest union -- the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which still represents Northwest ticket agents and ground workers. Now AMFA is trying to gain support amid a labor movement that is itself splintered, with unions breaking away from the AFL-CIO -- which counts the machinists among its member unions. And in seeking that support, this year is the first time the union has taken part in the Labor Day parade. During an afternoon rally in Greektown, AMFA members were buoyed as they enter their third week on strike at Northwest. "It will really recharge our battery for another two weeks," Sutton said. Contact JEWEL GOPWANI at 313-223-4550 or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
