July/August 2003 • Vol 3, No. 7 •

When Northwest Flight Attendants voted last week to leave the Teamsters Union and join an independent union, the Professional Flight Attendants Association, no one should have been surprised, least of all Teamsters President James Hoffa, the son of the legendary Jimmy Hoffa. After twenty-six years, at least a majority of the 11,000 flight attendants had their fill of the union and the heavy-handed autocracy that’s back in the union’s headquarters and fully in charge.

The head of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Ken Paff, said in a prepared statement, “Hoffa essentially drove 11,000 Teamsters out of the union, 75 percent of them women, by refusing to deal with their issues or their elected leaders.”

The Teamsters Union came close to losing the flight attendants before. On the eve of their 1990 preparations to decertify from the union, Ron Carey, then a candidate for the union’s top post, urged the flight attendants to stay, saying that when he won the election he would see that their problems would get his close attention. As president, one of Carey’s first moves was to facilitate the organization of a national union local for the flight attendants, who were separated in scattered local unions, and therefore always had minority status and influence. For a time the flight attendants seemed hopeful. They overwhelming voted for Carey the two times he ran for president and elected a slate of reform officers, some of whom joined TDU, attended TDU’s annual conventions and served as key TDU leaders and organizers.

But when agents of the federal government drove Carey from the union on bogus charges that a federal jury wouldn’t buy, the relationship between the national union and the flight attendants once again soured. First, Hoffa put his power behind a proposed concessionary contract that the flight attendants decisively rejected, despite a Madison Ave-type campaign by Hoffa that included multiple mailings to workers homes and a videotape plea for their ratification. When some flight attendants last year began to organize for a decertification vote, Hoffa removed the local union’s officers and installed his supporters, ending any chance for reconciliation.

The former local union leadership led the decertification campaign, and seemingly had little trouble in winning a majority to their view that the Teamsters Union was not in the best interests of the flight attendants. TDU refers to the flight attendants choice to represent them now as an “upstart,” partly meaning a small independent union that won’t have the clout to defend the workers from the airline bosses, now on an industry-wide drive for massive concessions. Reportedly, Northwest is demanding that the flight attendants agree to wage and other concessions totaling some $900 million over 6 years.

From the start TDU clearly believed that the flight attendants were making a grievous error, and attempted to win some concessions from Hoffa that might head-off the decertification. “TDU leaders tried repeatedly,” they say, “to consult with and help the Teamster leadership, calling for expanding the Teamster leadership team, promising a clear end-date to end the trusteeship with a pledge that the unpopular Hoffa-appointees would not seek office.”

But obviously, the flight attendants had no good choices. They could vote to give up unionism all together, they could continue to endure what TDU has repeatedly called Hoffa’s strong-arm tactics, or they could attempt to use their leverage independently, unhindered by Hoffa’s callous interference. With their past gains under attack from their bosses, chances are slim that they will prevail where other airline unions are failing. Yet the choice they made to get out from under the Teamster bureaucracy is one that many workers will understand.

Machinists at United Airlines, too, are faced with choices much like the Northwest workers. They may vote to leave the Machinists Union, like the Teamsters a major AFL-CIO affiliate. They are simultaneously being urged to breakaway and to stay by leftists in the Machinists ranks, who have failed to find a united answer to the union’s concessions policies that drive the decertification effort. The efforts of both machinists and flight attendants to try decertification as a remedy to their problems are no coincidence, but their efforts don’t represent a major trend—not yet. Despite the several decades of retreat and defeat suffered by U.S. workers, unionized or not, there’s no labor upsurge on the horizon, no clear signs of an upheaval akin to the sort that reshaped unions during the Great Depression and favorably altered the relationship of workers power with the bosses.

In an independent union, the flight attendants stand a chance of learning more about the pitfalls of business unionism, as their democratic structure gives them a better feel for the battleground of the class-struggle being waged against them. To the extent that these experiences provide the basis for a new beginning, a militant unionism, the flight attendants have chosen the right course.