Walkout Already Lost, Experts Say : Eastern Airlines Pilots Work to Keep Strike Alive

As he had done perhaps 300 times in the last couple of months, Dave Robbins walked into a travel agency, this time in Cerritos. He stood out because he was wearing an Eastern Airlines pilot’s uniform and because he didn’t want to buy a ticket.

He wanted to make a speech.

I’d like you to stop booking clients on Eastern Airlines, he said politely and a bit timidly to the agency’s impassive manager. Even though Eastern is flying more planes than it used to, the strike by the machinists and pilots and flight attendants is still on, he said. Most of the people flying and servicing the planes are inexperienced. It’s not safe, he said. Those of us who are on strike would like to go back to work if we can find a new owner.

It has come to this. Seven months after Eastern Airlines’ unions went on strike against owner Frank Lorenzo--the man organized labor hates above all others--strikers have been reduced to quixotic gestures like the “travel agent visitation program” organized by Robbins’ union, the Air Line Pilots Assn.

Desperately, labor is trying to find a sense of victory in a strike that virtually every airline industry analyst and many labor experts say has already been lost. Hope now rests on legislation in Congress to create a commission to recommend a solution to the strike, and on the union’s attempt to persuade a federal bankruptcy judge to appoint a special trustee to run the airline in place of Lorenzo.

Meanwhile, Eastern, which canceled almost all its 1,100 daily flights in the opening days of the strike and quickly sought protection from creditors under federal bankruptcy laws, has recovered, albeit shakily.

Surviving on cheap fares, strike-breakers and the ongoing sale of $1.8 billion in assets, ultimately including 40% of its planes, the airline now makes several hundred flights a day. By the end of the year it hopes to operate as many as 800 flights a day in a new, shrunken system staffed by 17,000 employees, compared to the pre-strike total of 31,000.

Jobs Already Filled

Eastern’s executives, who accuse the unions of having “destructive goals,” say that even if the strikers gave up tomorrow and decided to come back, there would be no room for many of them. Thousands of jobs have been filled.

Thus, there are no gray areas. To Eastern’s unions, bitterly resentful of a series of wage cuts demanded by Lorenzo since he took over the financially troubled airline in 1986, the strike has always centered on control of the airline rather than money or benefits. Workers still say flatly that the strike will not end until Lorenzo, chairman of Texas Air Corp., which also owns the non-union Continental Airlines, sells the airline to a new owner who would negotiate a back-to-work agreement and fire the strike-breakers.

A month into the strike, the unions thought they had won when former Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth tried to buy Eastern, only to back out late in the game.

Now most of the 8,000 machinists who struck on March 4 and the 3,600 pilots and 7,000 flight attendants who walked out in sympathy are biding their time, working part-time jobs. The International Assn. of Machinists, the most militant of the unions involved, says that virtually all its membership is still on strike. But hundreds of pilots and flight attendants have crossed picket lines or sought work at other airlines.

In Southern California, where Eastern had relatively few flights to begin with, those who remain on strike face the daunting challenge of reminding the flying public that there indeed is a strike.

Many Forget

“A lot of people will come up to me in church and say, ‘How’s the flying going?’ and I tell them I’ve been on strike for seven months, and they say, ‘Oh, I just booked a ticket on Eastern,’ ” said Barbara Sarno-Sjelin, of Cypress, a veteran Eastern flight attendant who is working as a department store saleswoman.

Despite public inattention, rallies every other Saturday at Los Angeles International Airport draw an impressively diverse and determined collection of 100 to 200 union men and women--miners, maids, Teamsters and garment workers--who regard the war of attrition between Eastern and its unions as Armageddon.

Lorenzo, picketers declare, is the most heinous of American “union busters,” an owner who demanded outrageous concessions in order to bait workers into a strike so he could replace them with non-union workers and is now selling off the airline chunk by chunk in order to liquidate it or merge it with Continental. Eastern denies that either a liquidation or merger is planned.

Picket signs compare Lorenzo--who made similar use of federal bankruptcy laws six years ago to break Continental Airlines’ unions--to everyone from Hitler to Pinocchio.

Taunts at LAX

Luggage-loaded passengers who happen to hop out of cars at Eastern’s LAX terminal when rallies are being held must not only cross a picket line to get to the ticket line but also listen to jeers that include the taunt, “Fly cheap, die cheap.”

Although pilots hired by Eastern after the strike began meet Federal Aviation Administration requirements, many of them have far less experience than the pilots who went out. It aggravates strikers that despite all the rhetoric about inexperienced pilots and shoddy maintenance--including a recent decision by the FAA to revoke the mechanics’ licenses of three Eastern supervisors for allegedly falsifying maintenance records at Kennedy Airport in New York--passengers continue to be lured to Eastern by discount fares.

Even before the strike, the financially troubled airline had a reputation for inconsistent service. Yet while “the strike affected people’s willingness to fly Eastern, the low prices (that Eastern introduced once the strike began) brought them back,” said James Buckle, owner of a travel agency in Atlanta, one of Eastern’s major cities. In recent weeks Eastern has said that its planes are up to 75% full.

Still Cheaper

While Eastern has increased its prices in recent months, it still undercuts other major carriers by up to 40% on some domestic routes, Buckle said.

Which is why Dave Robbins is spending six days a week visiting travel agents.

Robbins, 42, of Glendora, got union religion late. He came to Eastern as a strike-breaker shortly after the strike began, but decided after he had been hired and gone through part of his training that he had made a mistake. He did a 180-degree turn, went out on strike and joined the Air Line Pilots Assn.

Financially well-off from other business ventures (and also receiving the $600-a-week strike pay that the affluent pilots’ union pays its members), Robbins said he committed himself to a full-time schedule of travel agency visits to prove to fellow union members that he is a brother.

“I’d flown for small commuter companies and I’d never been involved in a union, and I had the misconception a lot of people had that the pilots were overpaid, spoiled brats who were walking away from $9,000-a-month jobs,” Robbins said. When he decided to apply for a job at Eastern during the strike, he says, “I didn’t know anything about Lorenzo.”

Robbins changed his mind after talking to ALPA members who routinely attempt to persuade strike-breaking pilots that they stand to be blackballed from all union airlines. In June he became involved in the travel agent effort.

14,000 Travel Agents Contacted

The pilots’ union estimates that it has contacted or written letters to 14,000 U.S. travel agents asking them not to book on Eastern and to limit bookings on Continental, which unions say provides financial support to Eastern.

The value of the program is impossible to measure--”like lighting candles to make the world brighter,” says Dave Haag, a striking Eastern captain who helps route visitation statistics to pilot union headquarters.

Pilots don’t keep track of how many travel agents will or won’t sell on Eastern. They simply speak their piece.

On one recent afternoon in Cerritos, Robbins, stopping his black Dodge wherever he saw an agency on a well-manicured commercial strip, experienced the gamut of reactions.

He found one agency where a sales trainee did not know about the strike. He found another where the owner knew, but sold few Eastern tickets.

He found another where the owner informed Robbins sternly that he was no fan of unions. “You’re talking to the wrong person,” the owner said. “I’ve shut down a plant because the union wouldn’t cooperate.”

Some Need Convincing

“There’s no way that guy is ever going to be (for the) union,” Robbins said as he climbed back into his car, “unless he loses a loved one on an Eastern flight flown by a scab pilot.”

A mile away, though, Robbins found a travel agent who said she was “terrified” of booking flights on Eastern and would not do it unless a passenger demanded it. And a mile after that he found another one who said she discourages customers from using Eastern because she doesn’t believe the airline is reliable.

Consensus: No consensus.

The last several weeks have seen a swirl of activity surrounding the Eastern strike. Labor was encouraged when, after months of delay, the U.S. Senate last week agreed to vote on the bill to create a strike investigation commission. Eastern was encouraged when the bankruptcy court judge further delayed the union’s request for a trustee to be put in charge of the airline.

Moreover, pilot solidarity with machinists appeared to crack when the leader of Eastern’s pilots suggested that pilots return to work--a suggestion that cost him his union post. Even more critical is a decision expected later this month by the national membership of the pilots’ union on whether to continue to pay strike benefits to Eastern strikers.

The loss of pilot support would be politically unpleasant, “but I don’t think it will affect us directly,” said Joe Mos, head of the machinists’ Los Angeles strike committee.

The stage is set for a quagmire, an unresolved dispute in which Eastern planes continue to fly and Eastern strikers continue to picket.

‘A Messy Ending’

“The strike has been lost,” said Leo Troy, a labor economist at Rutgers University. “It’s likely there’ll be a continuous drifting back of ALPA members and machinists. One day, whether the strike will be officially acknowledged to be over, it will be over. I don’t think there will be a settlement in a comfortable way. It will drag out until it’s completely meaningless. It’s going to be a messy ending.”

Dave Haag, who will soon celebrate his 25th anniversary with Eastern, and who left a management position as a flight supervisor to go on strike, reflected on the prospects of such a conclusion.

“It’s like two guys punching each other in a boat and the boat is going down,” he said. “Does it matter who won?”