Historically here have been fewer greater explicit advocates of the doctrine of business unionism than trade union bureaucrats in the US. Once this doctrine had a material base, faced with a numerically powerful labour movement that encompassed about one third of the labour force, the US ruling class in the 1950s and 60s was able or was forced to concede increases in real wages as well as substantial pension and health care benefits.
That was a long time ago, and today the international offensive of the US ruling class is reflected in the domestic field. It has achieved some considerable success in rolling back many of the social gains achieved by the working class in the decades immediately after World War II.
Rather than fight this rightward shift, the overwhelming majority of the US trade union bureaucracy have moved to the right in tandem with the ruling class and increasingly have become another arm of management. Many union leaderships encouraging and succeeding in getting their members to accept reductions in pay and benefits under management pressure throughout US industry.
This has been nowhere more true than in the US airline industry.
What has though made the airline industry exceptional has been the growth in recent years of an independent and democratic union, the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA). The traditional union for aircraft mechanics was the AFL-CIO affiliated International Association of Machinists (IAM).
In recent years though it has been AMFA that has gained recognition in certification elections for aircraft mechanics at number of airlines including Northwest Airlines (NWA) in 1997. Though a relatively small union, AMFA has grown because of its democratic internal structures which strongly contrasts with the outright collusion between the IAM bureaucracy and management throughout the airline industry.
AMFA members have been on all out strike at NWA since 20 August. The strike was clearly provoked by NWA management, making demands for redundancies as well as pay and benefit cuts that they knew AMFA could not and would not accept.
NWA had been preparing for this strike for well over a year in terms of recruiting and training a scab workforce to replace the AMFA strikers - a dispute which has reputedly cost about $100 million.
AMFA is now largely on its own against NWA. At the national level AMFA has received no support from either the AFL-CIO or the unions in the Change To Win Coalition who recently left that federation.
AMA has had little support even from other airline unions and especially not from the IAM who have very probably collaborated behind the scenes with management. Certainly there are IAM members working as scabs.
But there is substantial grassroots support for AMFA throughout the US labour movement.
The stakes in this strike are extremely high.
US trade unions have been retreat and have seen their memberships decline for many years as they have witnessed a whole catalogue of defeats.
The strike has the potential to become a watershed in the history of the US labour movement. A victory for AMFA in this strike could turn the tide for US labour and would represent a victory for class struggle trade unionism over the business unionism that has long permeated the leadership of the US labour movement.
On that basis it is clear that there are many within the US labour bureaucracy who would rather see victory go to NWA in such a high profile dispute rather than to an independent and democratic union such as AMFA. A victory for AMFA
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