BY ERNIE MAILHOT  
After 686 days on strike against Eastern Airlines, rank-and-file members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and our supporters registered the final piece of our victory against the union-busting drive of the employers when the carrier folded at midnight on January 18, 1991.

On that day, as they left work at airports throughout the United States, grim-faced managers and scabs from Eastern Airlines were greeted by strikers from the IAM. This was something the so-called replacement workers had become used to in the twenty-two-month-long strike at Eastern Airlines. But Friday night, January 18, was different.

Martin Shugrue, the government trustee running Eastern, announced the next day that Eastern had "run out of time and resources." After sixty-two years, Eastern, one of the first and one of the largest airlines in the world, was ending its operations.

Eastern strikers from coast to coast, from Puerto Rico to Canada, reacted by calling to congratulate each other and going to the airport to celebrate.

Mark McCormick was one of the Eastern strikers who made his way to New York's La Guardia Airport the night of January 18. "I wouldn't have missed this for the world," he said, as he stood watching management personnel walk out. With a big smile on his face, he suggested to the managers that they "take tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow off."

Over the next few hours, strikers and our supporters showed up—many with handmade signs—at rowdy picket lines. The sign I think expressed our feelings the best was the one at the Miami airport that read, "We said we'd last 'One day longer.'"

The big-business press, which for many months had referred to the strike only in the past tense, sent reporters to airports and interviewed strikers. Now they referred to Eastern in the past tense as they interviewed us in the present.

A typical question to strikers was one asked by the New York Times reporter: "Why do you seem happy?"

The next day the Times answered its own question in an article that said, "The hatred and passions stirred by the long strike of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers lie at the heart of why Eastern was forced" to park its 170 planes and begin selling its assets.

The twenty-two-month strike of the IAM had defeated Eastern's attempt to create a profitable nonunion airline and set an example for all bosses who want a "union-free environment" if they can get away with it.

To strikers and other working people, the scope of the accomplishments and victories scored in the Eastern strike are measured by what we were up against.

In 1981 U.S. president Ronald Reagan tried to set in motion union busting on a national scale when he broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). A pattern soon developed of union-busting drives by the employers in major industries, with Frank Lorenzo's destruction of striking unions at Continental Airlines in 1983 spearheading the assault.

Takeback contracts, permanent replacement workers, and union busting itself became the order of the day. In the airline industry, nonunion airlines were established and strikes, such as that of the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants at TWA in 1986, were crushed.

On March 4, 1989, when we went on strike at Eastern Airlines, we looked back on almost a decade of many more defeats than victories for labor—defeats that more often than not came without a real fight by union members.

We faced Frank Lorenzo, the number one union buster in the United States. We faced government agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, that continually backed Eastern management in the face of massive union documentation of safety violations at the airline.

We faced the federal government and its proven track record of siding with big business, a course backed by the Democratic and Republican parties alike. In Lorenzo's case the cozy relationship between his airline holding company, Texas Air Corporation, and the federal government was well known. One example that we all talked about was that of the judge who presided over the Continental Airlines bankruptcy in the early 1980s. He was later hired by Texas Air for a cushy post. Thanks, Your Honor.  
 
 
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