TV REVIEW : ‘Collision Course’ Between Eastern, Its Unions

After watching “Collision Course,” KCET’s documentary (at 10 tonight) about the intense labor/management conflicts at troubled Eastern Airlines, you might wonder how the company is still flying.

The country’s third largest airline, Eastern has a long history of labor/management strife. However, it reached company-killing proportions in the early 1980s, when the effects of airline deregulation hit Eastern like a wind shear.

While dozens of lean, low-cost and customer-hungry non-union airlines such as People Express were springing into existence and Eastern was losing $183 million and its corporate debt was hitting $2.5 billion, Eastern’s unions and management fought a bitter civil war.

As “Collision Course” shows in interviews with everyone from Eastern’s astronaut president Frank Borman to jet-engine repairmen and machinists union leader Charles Bryan, it got pretty ugly and stupid.

Borman, who threatened his employees with bankruptcy in 1983 unless labor costs were reduced, received death threats. Baggage handlers admit that they didn’t care if planes left late. Mechanics admit they deliberately took two days to do two-hour jobs. Management spied on workers with binoculars and, as one Eastern exec put it, the whole culture of the corporation was to be mean and nasty.

Although a final-hour pact between Borman and Bryan bought two years of blissfully productive labor/management cooperation, in 1985, fare wars and Eastern’s huge debt brought Eastern down. It was sold to Texas Air president Frank Lorenzo, the current owner, who laid off 2,000 employees and threatened pay cuts of 60%. All-out war between labor and management returned. It continues today.

In addition to being a reasonably neutral observer, “Collision Course” provides a nice mini-lesson on the stormy history of management/labor relations in America and supplies intelligent analysis from the likes of the New Republic’s Robert Kuttner.

More important, perhaps, the hour also tells the Eastern story in the context of airline deregulation. Deregulation may yet prove fatal for Eastern and its employees, but, as the program makes clear without perhaps intending to, consumers are better off for it.

Ably produced, directed and written by Alex Gibney, “Collision Course” is a production of the Pacific Basin Institute in association with KCET.