Tentative agreement for American Airlines flight attendants mirrors sellouts in auto, UPS and rail

help.”

This was the same position that railroad workers found themselves two years ago. But at the eleventh hour before the strike deadline, the rail union bureaucracy announced a tentative agreement, brokered by the Biden administration. This contract met none of the workers’ demands, including for paid sick leave.

Workers stunned the union apparatus and the White House by rejecting the deal, but the unions still refused to call a strike, biding for time until after the midterm elections so that Congress and the White House could pass anti-strike legislation and impose the deal.

In the American Airlines talks, the Biden administration has also been closely involved, as it has in every major contract over the last three and a half years. It sent Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and acting Labor Secretary Julie Su to keep tabs on the situation and ensure that a pro-corporate deal was passed. Buttigieg was instrumental in imposing the railroad contract, and Su played a leading role in ramming through a deal on the West Coast ports last year.

The APFA is also closely following the playbook established by the Teamsters at UPS. Using misdirection to present the contract as the product of “tough” talks, the Teamsters pretended to be preparing for a strike it had no intention of calling. They concealed the fact that the contract paved the way for tens of thousands of job cuts under the company’s new automated “Network of the Future

“Endless picketing events, engagement with the media and the traveling public, and a solid 99.47% ‘yes’ strike vote authorization pushed this management team to a tentative contract that rightfully addresses our scheduling and economic needs,” Hedrick said in a statement. “Strikes and the threat of strikes work.”

Even according to its own messaging, the APFA would have only called a limited strike, targeting certain flights instead of calling a nationwide walkout to bring the airline’s operations to a halt. The union claimed that this limited strike strategy would best serve the flight attendants because most of them would still get paychecks, as the union lacks the necessary strike fund to pay workers fully during a strike.

The APFA also told flight attendants to be prepared to miss credit card payments if they strike, an indication that the union bureaucracy was unprepared to strike and was willing to starve out the rank and file to end the struggle on unfavorable terms.

This is the same tactic employed by the United Auto Workers in its “standup strike” last fall, which barely dented production at US automakers. After weeks of fruitless picketing, the UAW rammed through a deal, endorsed by President Biden, which has since been used to lay off thousands of people.

If the APFA did not make financial preparations to fund a strike during three years (although it does control $17 million in net assets, according to the latest filings with the Department of Labor), this only exposes the fact that it never intended to call a strike. Nevertheless, flight attendants could call upon workers in other unions to support them. The American trade unions controlled $35.8 billion in net assets as of 2020, all of it financed through workers’ dues money.

Flight attendants face powerful adversaries, including the government, but these forces are themselves in crisis, as shown most recently by the withdrawal of Biden as the Democratic nominee and the degenerate spectacle at the Republican National Convention. They should take confidence that they can still win their demands, as long as they have organizations they control and a viable strategy on which to fight.

They must learn from the experiences of workers in the railroads, at UPS and auto, in particular, where workers formed rank-and-file committees to oppose the sellouts and government interventions. In its founding statement in September 2022, the Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee explained its strategy in the following terms:

Our strength lies not in the pretended support of the Democrats but the real and powerful support from the working class. We must appeal for support from the dockworkers, the refinery workers, the tens of millions of workers around the country who are fighting against the same things as us. If we make a stand, workers will see us as the tip of the spear for a broad counteroffensive. This is exactly what Congress is afraid of, and why Biden, the railroads and their union accomplices are trying to keep us on the job: If a crack appears anywhere, then the whole dam is liable to break.