After the parade, 150 AMFA strikers and their supporters held an impromptu rally against Northwest near the end of the procession.

Nearly 4,400 mechanics, cleaners, and custodians at Northwest Airlines went on strike August 19 at airports across the United States. The union rejected the company’s demands for deep cuts in jobs and wages.

Unions of flight attendants, ground workers, and pilots are all currently involved in negotiations over wages and benefits with the company. The Air Line Pilots Association has agreed to pay cuts under threat that the airline would file for bankruptcy. Now, citing higher fuel costs, Northwest Airlines is saying it may increase the $1.1 billion annually in concessions it is demanding from workers at the airline.

“We support [the strikers] no matter what,” said Doug Green, president of UAW Local 174, at the Labor Day event “United we stand, divided we fall.” The UAW local provides its parking lot as a staging area for organizing the AMFA picket lines. AMFA Local 5 vice president Dennis Sutton explained his local has received financial and other support from several unions and many individual working people in this area.

Jackie Deal, a flight attendant at Northwest Airlines and a member of Professional Flight Attendants Association (PFAA), is walking the picket line with AMFA workers at Detroit’s International Airport. Deal has been reporting to work, but is also supporting the strikers. “If Northwest succeeds, all bosses across the country will try to eliminate good paying union jobs,” she said.

In Minnesota, Militant reporters were on hand September 1 for a protest of more than 200 mechanics and supporters of AMFA Local 33 picketing three Minneapolis area hotels housing replacement workers. “We disrupted the shift change at Northwest Airlines, and that was our intention,” said Ted Ludwig president of Local 33 to the local media.

Ludwig received cheers from protestors when he said this protest and a previous picket line of 100 in front of these same hotels organized jointly by AMFA and Local 3800 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union (AFSCME) were not one-time protests. “We will continue to do this, to disrupt the traffic of scabs to the Minneapolis airport,” he said.

At a September 3 solidarity meeting for Northwest strikers in Minneapolis, Ludwig reported that officers and strike coordinators of Local 33 were being served with subpoenas by Northwest for supposed monetary damages related to the protests. Karen Schultz, a staff person for PFAA in Minneapolis, talked about company intimidation tactics against the flight attendants to undercut solidarity with the mechanics and undercut the possibility of another labor action against the airline. Schultz described the ongoing training of thousands of scabs to fill flight attendant positions in the event of a strike. Fifty Northwest strikers participated in the Harriet Island Labor Day celebration in St. Paul, Minnesota, leafleting and holding signs asking for support.

Marshall Lambie is a member of the Young Socialists and a student at Wayne State University in Detroit.
 

BY LEA SHERMAN  
SAN FRANCISCO-Some 250 supporters of the striking Northwest mechanics rallied at the San Francisco airport on Labor Day, September 5. The majority of the crowd were airport workers, particularly United Airlines mechanics and their families who are in the same AMFA local as the striking workers at Northwest airlines here.

Trent Willis, president of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10, and JoAnne Kazemi, union representative for the Professional Flight Attendants Association at Northwest addressed the crowd offering their support.

Janice Sisco, a ticket agent at Northwest Airlines and chairperson of the International Association of Machinists Local 1781 Grievance Committee also spoke. The IAM is not on strike at this point. “This is not about IAM or AMFA,” Sisco said. “It is about the union movement. Now is not a time to be divided, it is a time for solidarity.”
 
 
Related articles:
18,000 Boeing workers strike against concessions
UK airport workers fight to defend union  
 
 
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