The FAA Follies

Thought this would be one post, but it looks like another series of posts coming up here for you folks on the Follies.  Hope you’ll bear with me.

As many NATCA members know, recently there have been special meetings around the country where we can listen to our national and regional leadership speak as well as ask questions.  I had the good fortune to attend one recently and based on what I heard, I went and found a copy of an out-of-print book, Confessions of a Union Buster by Martin Jay Levitt with Terry Conrow, published in 1993.

Anyone who doesn’t believe that the Agency has declared war on organized labor with the actions of Bush-appointed lackey, Marion Blakey, and her hired stooges had best wake up and pay attention.  While I refer to NATCA in my posts, I haven’t forgotten the other unions who are fighting the Agency, but I know NATCA best.  As Marty Levitt states in his book:

“Despite vastly different job descriptions, the fundamental interests of employees are strikingly similar.  They all worry about pay and medical insurance; they all wish for fairness, consistency, equity, autonomy, a process for redress of grievances, employment security, health and safety.”

Marty also states (I’ll be quoting Marty a lot):

“I come from a very dirty business…”

“But really the consultants are terrorists….as the consultants go about the business of destroying unions, they invade people’s lives, demolish their friendships, crush their will, and shatter their families.”
 
“But within the field of labor relations the big money is in union busting.”

“I could not have predicted that the field…was one in whose service I would come to routinely dupe frightened managers, rob corporate coffers, betray confidences, and break the law…”

Take a look here at a court case involving Joseph N. Miniace, Blakey’s hired gun, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Human Resource Management (former title of Deputy Assistant Administrator for Strategic Labor Management Relations) and lead negotiator on the FAA’s contract negotiating team.   Pages 5, 6, 18, and 19 are especially interesting.  Mr. Miniace was making in excess of $350,000 per year with perks.  

Remember this, people:

“Union busting is a field populated by bullies and built on deceit.  A campaign against a union is an assault on individuals and a war on truth.  As such, it is a war without honor.  The only way to bust a union is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten and always, always attack.”

Built on deceit.  Lie, distort, manipulate, threaten and always, always attack.

“Union busters wield great power through their program of terror and manipulation – people don’t, can’t possibly know what’s going on and who’s telling the truth.  You have to appreciate that most of the people [at a workplace] are just regular people.  They in their lives have no experience with violence, with being lied to, with manipulation, and with being harassed in open, gross, insulting ways.  The first time this program happens to regular people, they’re terrified.  Their fondest wish after a few months of this is that it would just go away and go back to being like it was.  The union busters know this.  None of this is intellectual at all.  It works on the gut.”

How many of you have people at your facilities that just wish it would all go away?  That NATCA just accept something to make it stop?  That NATCA just stops fighting altogether?  That maybe the lies the Agency are spreading might actually be true?  It’s funny how early on, before Mr. Levitt’s writing came to light, NATCA came up with the bumper sticker that stated “I believe NATCA”.   Keep believing, folks.

“I was not bound by any code of ethics or any professional canons and therefore would not have to worry about my behavior at the bargaining table.  In fact, for the purposes of my resume, the naughtier I was, the better…..because a charge of surface bargaining is very difficult to substantiate…All I would have to do to defend myself would be to show that I had agreed to something, that some progress had been made.”

Nowadays, surface bargaining is condoned by the Bush-stacked FLRA as “hard bargaining.”

“Where the status quo guidelines did not suit me, I ignored them.”

And another article I found about Mr. Miniace [Note - PMA is the Pacific Maritime Association and ILWU is the International Longshore and Warehouse Union]:

Despite reports in the corporate media weighted in its favor, the PMA is becoming more and more exposed for the union-busting greed behind its lockout of the port workers. In one recent negotiating session with the ILWU, the PMA showed up with gun-toting security guards. Union leaders walked out, saying they would not negotiate with guns in the room.  At the rally, speaker after speaker condemned the threats coming from the Bush administration. Trent Green, a business agent for ILWU Local 10, referred to PMA head Joseph Miniace as “a terrorist because he is attacking our jobs.”

On hearing that Bush had ignored a union offer to go back to work under the old contract for 30 days, invoking Taft-Hartley proceedings instead, ILWU Local 10 president Richard Mead said, “This is what the PMA wanted all along. They didn’t bargain in good faith and they held the economy hostage to force the Bush administration to intervene on their behalf.”

“every act we performed every day was motivated by but one base desire – a lust to dominate.”

“viciousness and insidiousness on the war on unions…under the benign label of ‘union avoidance’”

Another article from 2002:

But on a less-theoretical level, the ILWU says its union-busting case is self-evident, starting with the maritime association itself—particularly the man running it, Joseph Miniace. “He’s a union buster,” says Tacoma’s Lelli, who watched from across town as Charles Hurwitz dismantled Kaiser Aluminum three years ago after similar lockout tactics against steelworkers. “This isn’t [Miniace's] first and won’t be his last. It’s the only reason he was hired. . . . He had no experience in shipping. He had one set of experiences, and he’s using it.”

MINIACE ARRIVED TO run the maritime association in the mid-1990s with a run of successfully attacking unions during confrontations in the health care and airline industries.

“By dragging a union through the plodding legal system, we showed workers that the labor organization was sluggish and inefficient…”

He first came to national labor attention at the maritime association by adopting a new tactic: repeated multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the ILWU and its members for losses from job actions.

“It was a contemptible plan.  But it was a perfect one by the only measure that matters in the war on labor: it worked.”

This 2004 article in the Ivey Business Journal takes a “sympathetic” view of Miniace’s actions.

“In the end I understood that a union-busting campaign left a company financially devastated and hopelessly divided and almost invariably created an even more intolerable work environment than before…”

Marty forgot to add “leaving a morally bankrupt management team.”

More to follow….