Union-Buster Memorial Airport

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Maybe they should have called it Union-Busting Memorial National Airport,
instead.
	
That would have more appropriately highlighted one of Ronald
Reagan's most notorious achievements, the decision to fire 1,800 striking
air traffic controllers early in his first term. Congress's decision to
name Washington's airport for Reagan dishonors working people across the
country.
	
Want a sense of how bitter the memories are? Here's Randy Schwitz,
executive vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers
Association, the successor union to the broken PATCO: "I'd rather have a
hot poker in my eye than have an airport named after him [Reagan]."
	
The air traffic controllers' firing was about much more than the
men and women who help guarantee air traffic safety. Although it wasn't
the era's first large-scale firing or permanent replacement of striking
workers, it certainly was the most prominent. Reagan's action sent a
message to employers that they could act against striking or organizing
workers with virtual impunity. And it sent a message to workers that they
struck or sought to organize at their own peril. (The administration
backed up those messages by appointing members to the National Labor
Relations Board who had little apparent interest in enforcing the nation's
labor laws.)
	
A series of bitter labor conflicts over the next decade and a half
would drive that message home: Hormel, Continental Airlines, Eastern
Airlines, Caterpillar, A.E. Staley and many others. Occasionally unions
were able to resist successfully with aggressive and innovative tactics,
public outreach and unflinching solidarity -- as at Pittston Coal and more
recently UPS -- but these labor victories have been the exception.
	
Big business has capitalized on the new political and cultural
climate which Reagan helped create -- as well as enhanced power from
increased capital mobility, foreign competition, downsizing and rapid
technological change -- to wage full-scale class warfare against working
people. Employers use threats of plant relocations to bust unions; they
rely on weak or non-existent unions to permit downsizing; they capitalize
on technological change to speed restructuring and to shift production
abroad. Many workers are so intimidated that they fear unionizing or even
asking for a raise.
	
Here is how bad things are: The most comprehensive study done on
plant-closing threats in union organizing drives found that employers
threaten to close the plant in more than half of all union-organizing
drives. 
	
The study's author, Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor
education research at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations,
found that, during unionizing drives, employers regularly refer to NAFTA
and Mexican maquiladoras to prove how easy it would be for them to move
operations. She reports that one company in Michigan even parked flat-bed
trucks loaded with shrink-wrapped production equipment -- accompanied by
signs reading "Mexico Transfer Job" -- in front of the plant for the
duration of a union organizing drive. 
	
Plant-closing threats are regularly accompanied by a host of other
ruthless (and often illegal) anti-union measures. In union organizing
drives from 1993 to 1995, Bronfenbrenner found that more than a third of
employers discharged workers for union activity, 38 percent gave bribes or
special favors to those who opposed the union and 14 percent used
electronic surveillance of union activists. 
	
Sixty-four percent of employers in union election campaigns used
more than five anti-union tactics, ranging from holding captive audience
meetings where employer representatives lecture employees to threatening
to report workers to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
	
Most astoundingly, where union organizing drives are successful,
employers do in fact close their plant, in whole or in part, 15 percent of
the time.
	
All of this cannot, of course, be attributed to Ronald Reagan. But
he did more than his share to help bring it about. It is the shame of the
U.S. Congress that it decided to "honor" such a legacy.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor.

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman


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