United Airlines workers picket stockholders’ meeting
2016William Wood 2016-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 9 →
The words are the paper's own, from its digital file; the division into articles was made by machine, so a box or caption can end up inside the article next to it.
Scan page 9
Puerto Rican activists protest PROMESA, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, a bill just passed by the U. S. House of Representatives that would abrogate the island’s control over its spending in return for support for restructuring the debt. Puerto Rico owes $72 billion and will miss its next $2 billion payment to bondholders in July. According to the bill, a federal board would have the right to veto decisions by elected Puerto Rican officials. It also allows the governor to reduce the minimum wage for young people and to sell Puerto Rican assets. Photo courtesy of the Movimiento Independista Nacional Hostianos at http://minhpuertorico.org/ CHICAGO—About 250 unionized airline mainte nance technicians and flight attendants protested outside the United Airlines annual shareholders’ meeting on June 8 in downtown Chicago.
Workers came from Chicago and other cities around the country, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Orlando, Fla., and Newark, N.J., to demand a long-overdue contract.
Union members and supporters set up a picket line at the Wacker Drive entrance of Willis Tower, home of United’s national headquarters, and chanted slogans including “No Contract, No Peace!” “Delay, Delay, De lay Is Not OK!” and “They Got Theirs, We Want Ours!” a reference to United’s recent record profits.
The United Brotherhood of Teamsters, represent ing maintenance technicians, and the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), CWA, AFL-CIO, representing flight attendants, were the primary organizers of the protest. A union press release said its purpose was “to warn investors and customers of turbulence ahead.”
Prior to the picket line I spoke with Mark DesAngles, business agent for Teamster Local 986 at San Fran cisco International Airport. Before taking his union position, DesAngles worked for 25 years as an airline technician for United.
“We are here to tell United Airlines that we are not at all satisfied with the progress of negotiations,” said Palestine solidarity DesAngles. “We’ve been negotiating for over three years now and we want United to fulfill its promise. … Now that they are very profitable we expect them to give us a fair contract, and they have not done that so far.”
AFA-organized flight attendants are also negotiat ing and in mediation, and in a similar situation as the Teamsters. “We are supporting each other,” said De sAngles.
United has reached separate contract agreements with other unions representing a little over half of its employees, including pilots, dispatchers, and security officers.
Wages, retirement, and health care are all hot topics index.php/noticias/55-noticias/5048-2016-06-03-12-50-48.
capitalist parties. Indeed, in local elections, as well as national, Greens routinely endorse “progressive” Democrats, and in races where the Republican is a bit too overtly reactionary, “not so progressive Demo crats.”
Asking Bernie Sanders, a lifelong capitalist poli tician with a 98 percent Democratic Party voting record, to run as a candidate independent of and against the party he has assiduously supported for his entire career is like asking the proverbial leopard to change its spots.
Today, much of the socialist left has made this choice; some, like the Communist Party and Demo cratic Socialists of America, have habitually support ed Democrats for many decades. The CP today sup ports Clinton, while the DSA supports Sanders—that is, until Sanders drops out.
Solidarity and the International Socialist Organiza tion call on Sanders to run for the presidency as an “independent” or as the Green Party candidate. The Workers International League also speaks favorably of an “independent” campaign by Sanders.
The Workers World Party and the Party for Social in the negotiations. Technicians at United lost their pensions during company bankruptcy reorganiza tion, and now are making efforts to win them back in a new contract. Also, United has been consistently pushing for workers to pay a high percentage of their own health care costs.
Said DesAngles: “In the short term, we are involved in mediation with United Airlines. … The negotiating committee is meeting with the mediation board, and United Airlines is supposed to be present; and what we’ve said is we want United to get serious about the negotiations. We feel what they’ve been doing is es sentially drawing lines in the sand and not really hav ing constructive dialog. So we need them to get to the table and go to work.
“Members are really frustrated with that process, and we’re saying No More!”
He said that when United had a downturn in profit ability, “we lost our pension, we gave up a lot of wag es, we made a lot of concessions to keep the company afloat, and the promise was when the company be came profitable they would take care of us, and that’s not happening”
When asked about future plans, DeAngles said, “We are demonstrating here today, and we are demon strating on-going across the [United Airlines] system as much as we can—a national picket at least once a month. And we will continue to do so until we get a contract.” n ism and Liberation, both of which have called for votes for left-sounding Democrats in the past, in cluding Jesse Jackson, are fielding their own presi dential candidates this time around, but neverthe less have called for Democratic Party primary votes for Sanders.
Keenly aware of the rapidly growing interest in so cialist ideas generated by capitalism’s deepening cri ses and sparked by the Sanders campaign, Socialist Action branches across the country have sponsored a series of well-attended public debates where most of the above socialist organizations, as well as represen tatives from the Labor for Bernie campaign, shared the platform for fruitful exchanges.
While the “lesser evil” syndrome was undoubtedly at work in the presentations of these socialist groups, we were heartened to see that the Marxist-grounded revolutionary socialist ideas of Socialist Action were well received and that our proud party, a consistent participant and advocate of independent, mass-ac tion, united-front mobilizations against all aspects of capitalist racism and plunder, won new members to the cause of socialist revolution. n SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2016 9