The results of the ballot were announced July 14, two months after the company imposed pay cuts. For months leading up to the recent union election, United Airlines management demanded and won massive concessions from unionized workers. The company used its December 2002 bankruptcy filing to threaten workers with a court-imposed contract with even greater concessions than the company demanded. The pilots union officialdom was the first to push for accepting pay cuts of 30 percent and other takebacks. The IAM leadership followed suit, speaking at union meetings across the country in favor of taking concessions as the only way to supposedly save jobs and the airline.

In late April, the mechanics accepted a concession contract that extends to 2009. Included in this deal are 13 percent wage cuts, new work rules, and the contracting out of all heavy maintenance work on United’s fleets, which IAM officials had opposed in the past. These takebacks are widely seen as having contributed to the already existing dissatisfaction with the IAM officialdom and fueled the vote for AMFA.

Prior to the mechanics’ vote at United, AMFA represented 11,000 workers, mainly mechanics, at seven airlines, including Northwest’s 7,617 mechanics, and those at Alaska and Southwest. With the addition of mechanics and related workers at United, AMFA has now more than doubled its membership.

Previously the most recent victory for AMFA came in January, when it won a union representation election against the Teamsters at Southwest, bringing another 1,700 mechanics into its fold. O.V. Delle-Femine, head of AMFA, announced that the union is now moving to represent mechanics at USAir and American Airlines.

In reporting AMFA’s victory at United the big-business press—from the New York Times to the Chicago Tribune—referred to AMFA as a more “militant” and “combative” union, which is a false assertion.

The AMFA tops put forward a craft-union orientation that says “skilled” mechanics are better off bargaining separately from ramp workers, reservations agents and others. AMFA’s company-minded officialdom organized these raiding operations to break off mechanics from the IAM, which has traditionally organized mechanics in common locals with ramp workers and other more poorly paid airline workers. Some IAM members voted for recertification out of a desire for a change from the officialdom’s refusal to wage a fight to defend the interests of union members. The bureaucracy of the Machinists has sought to parry AMFA’s challenge by adapting to its reactionary orientation. In their unsuccessful effort in late 1998 to repel the AMFA challenge at Northwest, for example, the IAM bureaucracy aped AMFA’s craft mentality by establishing a separate district for mechanics.  
 
 
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