Chapter 12
The TWA Strike of 1946
“Golden Boys,” sneered Time magazine, as ALPA neared the
deadline for its first true strike in the fall of 1946. For John Q. Citizen, the
notion of well-paid airline pilots going out on strike was incomprehensible.
The average American, although irritated with organized labor because of the
great wave of postwar strikes, could understand why an ordinary working stiff
would hit the bricks. Inflation was raging, wages hadn’t kept up, and it was
hard to make ends meet. But to be inconvenienced by “the world’s most gilded and
exclusive labor union,” as Time
unflatteringly described ALPA, was another matter entirely.
To say that ALPA lacked broad support for its strike against Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA) would be a considerable understatement. The average newspaper reporter did not understand the issues, and for that reason news stories were often more confusing than informative. Nor were many labor leaders sympathetic. When Time referred to Dave Behncke as “a suave, self-assured retired pilot who looks about as radical as a Philadelphia Main Liner,” it played on the prejudices of ordinary working people, who couldn’t understand why pilots earning as much as $10,000 a year should be out on a picket line. Speaking to this blue-collar attitude, Phillip Murray of the Congress of Industrial Organizations snapped: “Labor dispute, hell! That’s a row between capitalists.”
In order to understand the roots of the TWA strike, we must first delve into three complicated issues: the four-engine pay dispute; the airlines’ attempt to negotiate on an industrywide basis; and the nature of Behncke’s leadership in the post–World War II period.
Beginning with the latter, let us turn to the recollections of Henry Weiss, the New York labor lawyer Behncke selected (on the advice of Fiorello LaGuardia) to assist him when the legal tangles got too intense for ALPA’s staff. Weiss’s perceptions of Behncke are important because as an outsider he could view Behncke without the hero worship many airline pilots felt for him.
The Dave Behncke I met in the late 1940s was an intractable negotiator whose tendency to see conspiracies everywhere convinced me that he was suffering from paranoia or some deteriorating mental condition. The Airlines Negotiating Committee had an almost traumatizing effect on him. All this began during the strike on TWA in 1946. Although Dave was an interesting man, he was difficult to deal with. After our initial confrontation, he never gave me any more trouble.
The
confrontation occurred down at
In
any event, that was when we had our break and I stood my ground. Afterward he
just kind of grinned at me. Eventually he and I got quite close, as close as
anybody could get to Dave. He never abused me, never challenged me again,
although I must say he could be quite abusive to the people around him, to his
lawyers from the
I think in the immediate post–World War II period, when aviation was really ready to go, more complicated, more sophisticated, he couldn’t cope. I think he was suffering the fate of many union leaders who had the drive and regularity of purpose to launch an organization, but who didn’t really have the ability to run it successfully once it got under way.
Behncke’s good fortune during the 1946 TWA strike was to be surrounded by pilots who carried him at a time when his shortcomings were becoming obvious. Jim Roe was one of these pilots:
I was mustered out of the Army on Dec. 25, 1945, and I returned
to the home base at
Well, Bill Judd went off to
fly on ICD [TWA’s “Intercontinental Division” operating transatlantic out of
Everything was boiling, so I
got started with some old friends, people like Red Foster and Dan Medler, trying
to see if we couldn’t get this thing straightened out. I went up to
Behncke had aged since I last saw him; he had more responsibilities on his mind. He should have delegated power to his trusted people, but he didn’t. It took its toll on him, but in late 1945 I can’t say that he looked particularly sick, or worse than he had before. That came later, the next year.
The four-engine pay
controversy on TWA had a long gestation period. It began when Boeing introduced
the prototype 307 Stratoliner in 1939. This revolutionary pressurized aircraft
had enormous possibilities. It could fly well over most weather, above the
airsickness-inducing turbulence that had always bedeviled passenger operations.
For Jack Frye and for TWA, the airline that prided itself on always being one
technological step ahead of the competition, an aircraft like the Boeing 307 was
irresistible. With the help of Howard Hughes’s millions, Frye had committed TWA
to the purchase of five Stratoliners in 1939, but the aircraft were not
delivered until just before World War II. The Army drafted all five shortly
thereafter, but in the brief period the Stratoliners operated for TWA, they set
new standards for comfort and luxury. United Airlines (UAL) announced in August
1939 that it, too, was entering the four-engine era with the purchase of six
Douglas DC-4s. The Stratoliner would lose out to
Behncke moved immediately to negotiate amendments to TWA’s contract when the Stratoliner appeared. Technically, only an amendment to the existing contract was necessary. TWA resisted, and so no contract amendment was signed by the time the military commandeered the aircraft.
Despite repeated efforts to negotiate pay scales for these new aircraft, ALPA got nowhere. There were two arbitration awards, in 1941 and again in 1945 (which increased pay slightly only for the Stratoliner), but pay scales for the DC-4 and the Lockheed Constellation were still unsettled when these aircraft were ready to enter service. ALPA’s first attempt to deal with the four-engine issue came at the Central Executive Council (CEC) meeting of April 29, 1939. After a good deal of wrangling, several CEC members expressed the opinion that Behncke should approach the pay issue on the basis of the weight of the aircraft, not the number of engines.
Behncke disapproved of this notion, preferring instead to stress the dangers of operating four-engine aircraft. Despite the dissension among CEC members, Behncke persisted in his argument that since the new aircraft would fly faster, encountering more weather and covering more miles, the pilots would necessarily encounter increased hazards, and so they deserved higher pay. Behncke also believed that having two additional engines to monitor would add to the distractions present, increasing the workload and offsetting any absolute gain in safety. His thinking was already outdated in 1939, and it would get worse.
Historical accident was on Behncke’s side, however, for although most pilots were already uncomfortable with some of his archaic notions about “hazard pay,” the shakedown days of every four-engine aircraft introduced on the airlines after World War II were marred by fatal accidents, often caused by design errors. Both the Lockheed Constellation and the pressurized version of the DC-4, the DC-6, were temporarily grounded following fatal accidents.
Philosophical considerations aside, every pilot agreed that the new aircraft should pay more than the old ones. The problem was how to negotiate pay scales that would take into account the new complexities of the aircraft—their heavier weight, higher passenger loads, and increased takeoff and landing speeds—without doing harm to certain positive aspects of Decision 83, ALPA’s historic security blanket.
And here, ALPA was hoisted with its own petard, for the companies suddenly became zealous defenders of Decision 83, arguing that it provided a “more than fair [and] practical system [for determing pay on] large or small, fast or slow aircraft.” As the Airlines Negotiating Committee put it during the presidential emergency board hearing of July 1946: “The committee believes that the flexibility of Decision 83 automatically compensating for all types of aircraft is in the continued interest of the air transport industry.”
Why this great turnaround? The answer lay in the fact that Decision 83, which the operators had so hotly opposed in the past, had an hourly pay scale that paid more incrementally for faster equipment, but the scale topped out at only 200 miles per hour. In 1934 no one thought airplanes could fly much faster than that, but four-engine aircraft easily exceeded the scale. So Decision 83’s speed-pegged component automatically guaranteeing pilots an increased share of an aircraft’s productivity was something of a time bomb.
Had Behncke been willing to
compromise on the issue of industrywide bargaining, the companies might in turn
have been willing to renegotiate the Decision 83 pay scales. They might even
have been willing to change Decision 83’s copilot pay scales, which were set at
straight monthly amounts according to seniority, topping out at only $225 per
month. These were admittedly only minimum guarantees, which could be raised by
contract negotiations. Copilots on TWA were earning $380 per month in
1946, with those on the ICD’s over-ocean routes eligible to earn another $30 per
month if they qualified as navigators. In fact, pilot pay had risen generally
since Decision 83 went into effect, largely because the average speed of
aircraft kept increasing during the 1930s. But Behncke was technically correct
when he insisted that airline pilots had not had a basic pay raise since 1934.
During this period the airline
industry was attempting to negotiate one contract covering all airlines, while
Behncke wanted to continue negotiating one airline at a time—the familiar
“jacking up the house” routine, which allowed the pilots of one airline to get a
little something, thus providing their fellows on another airline a target to
shoot for in their own negotiations. Although, historically, labor unions have
favored industrywide bargaining while employers have opposed it, in the air
transport industry it was just the opposite.
One of Dave Behncke’s most brilliant maneuvers had been to
include the pilots under the 1926 law designed to prevent the halting of
interstate commerce. The 1936 “pilot’s amendment” to the Railway Labor Act of
1926 gave Behncke a technical argument in favor of airline-by-airline
negotiations, and he clung to it tenaciously. The airline companies did not
realize the disadvantage of the one-by-one negotiating arrangement until the
first contracts started coming in. They resolved to fight it when they saw how
adroitly Behncke used the technique of exploiting a special circumstance on one
line to win what another line would never have given up. That second airline
would subsequently feel pressure to concede, however, because a competitor
would have given the game away earlier. As recounted in Chapter 10, Behncke’s
first encounter with the airlines’ demand for industrywide bargaining came at
the 1942 conference in
The period leading up to the TWA strike was replete with fruitless negotiations, endless mediation, and unsuccessful maneuvers. Neither side was willing to give on the fundamentals. Even the presidential emergency board, appointed in May 1946 by Harry Truman, couldn’t solve the problem. The Airlines Negotiating Committee, chaired by Ralph S. Damon, hung tough; so did Behncke. Any mediation that involved more than one airline resulted in an ALPA walkout and vice-versa on the part of the companies. Behncke once startled a group of airline executives who had assembled to attend a mediation covering more than one airline by saying: “I’m here to deal with one outfit. If the rest of you fellows want to look on, that’s all right with me. If that one outfit wants all of you to represent it, that’s all right with me. But remember, I’m dealing with one, only one.” Until Behncke agreed to recognize the Airlines Negotiating Committee, a new four-engine contract would not exist for anybody. There was such a deadlock that even a strike vote couldn’t shake them loose. TWA’s pilots took a strike authorization vote on March 26, 1946, approving it by a margin of 812 to 9. Truman’s presidential emergency board delayed it, but couldn’t stop it.
Robert N. “Bob” Buck, who
went to work for TWA in 1937 and later played a major role in ALPA affairs,
remembers that management didn’t take the strike vote seriously: “Frye was in
With his tendency to “live in the past,” as Henry Weiss saw it, Behncke had a hard time assimilating the myriad details associated with the incessant maneuvering, mediating, and negotiating. He began reverting to old tactics, sending out long, rambling denunciations of TWA’s management and of the Airlines Negotiating Committee and flooding the newspapers with vitriolic press releases, much as he had done back in 1933. He was fixed on TWA, unable to concentrate on major issues because he was so intimately wrapped up in minor ones. In the meantime, the day of reckoning kept getting closer, the new four-engine aircraft kept arriving, the pilots kept checking out. Perhaps it was too much for any man. Certainly it was too much for Behncke.
On May 21, 1946, during the height of the controversy, Behncke collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital. Many pilots suspected that Behncke had had a heart attack. Actually, it was a severe insulin deficiency brought on by a chronic diabetic condition he had concealed for years. It was probably aggravated by the strain of the accumulating troubles on TWA. Behncke kept it secret.
Dave Richwine, who went to work for TWA in 1940 only to have his career interrupted by military service in World War II, became involved in ALPA work for the first time by serving as an observer during several mediation sessions in 1946. His perspective on them is worth hearing:
We could have settled things early if everything hadn’t been conditioned on industrywide negotiating. All these negotiations, mediations—the company just wouldn’t make any decisions. They often sent in lawyers who had no other purpose than to talk and prolong without any resolution, and we couldn’t do it by ourselves. We’d agree to something and then they’d renege.
The first few months after the war, I was concerned most about getting myself qualified and back into operation. I was making $190 a month and I had a family so I was naturally very interested. I guess that’s why I was selected as one of the 12 or so pilots to help prepare exhibits, coordinate testimony, just generally witness things.
In the beginning I thought Dave Behncke was everything a labor leader should be. He was verbose and muddled sometimes, but generally I thought he was doing pretty well. One thing that struck me, though, was that when we went into these presidential emergency board hearings, a couple of the pilots gave Behncke a talking to. They told him, “Look, two things you’re going to do everyday. One is you’re going to wear a tie, and the other is you’re not going to say anything. We’ve got the best lawyer we can get, we’ve got a good list of witnesses. You’re not to get in there and louse it up.”
To his credit, Behncke never once interfered, and maybe that was the first time in his life.
But nothing worked. Every avenue led to another dead end. Finally, ALPA had no alternative but to strike. Behncke tried one last desperate ploy, sending Jimmy Roe to talk to Jack Frye personally. Jim Roe remembers:
The main conversation I had was with Mr. Frye. We were in Washington; Behncke and I and the other negotiators were there trying to avert the strike. We had set a deadline of midnight. The night before we went out on strike, I talked to Jack Frye. I told him, “We just can’t go on this way. It’s going to go unless we change.”
He said, “I can’t change it. I can’t do anything about it.” I went back and talked to Behncke and told him the situation and he said, “Well, that looks like the end of it.”
So I called the chairmen at the various councils and told them that midnight was the deadline. And we went out on strike.
On Oct. 21, 1946, ALPA struck TWA, breaking relations between labor and management. From then on it was economic warfare, a raw contest to see who ultimately had the power. Could ALPA withstand the forces of the marketplace? Would ALPA members hold the line and refuse to fly? Would TWA’s management try to break the union in 1946, as it had done once before in 1933? These were not idle questions, for in the long history of pilot-management relations, the economic position of management has nearly always been stronger. In 1946 the labor market was bloated, with many thousands of ex-military pilots who had recent experience in four-engine aircraft looking for jobs. If the work stoppage on TWA went on long enough, there was a good possibility that an outfit calling itself the Military Pilots Association (MPA) might try to break the strike.
MPA turned out to be more formidable in appearance than in fact, but it gave ALPA loyalists a few uneasy moments in 1946 (in 1948 on National Airlines [NAL] it would cause serious trouble). It claimed 13,000 members, all of whom had allegedly flown for the Air Transport Command. “While we are not now seeking jobs at the expense of airline pilots employed before Pearl Harbor,” an MPA spokesman in New York said on October 7, just as the strike became inevitable, “we believe that military pilots who served patriotically in the war deserve equal seniority with those who were hired as civilians during the war.” The implication was clear—anyone who didn’t wear a uniform during World War II was a draft dodger and didn’t deserve to be in an airline cockpit.
Fortunately, the strike didn’t last long enough to allow MPA an opening. On Nov. 16, 1946, the strike ended with an agreement to arbitrate. Paul Richter signed for TWA, and Behncke signed for ALPA. The strike lasted just three weeks, but it had dominated the national newswires, prompting a good deal of heated argument in Congress. Judge Frank P. Douglass of the National Mediation Board (NMB) selected F. M. Swacker as the neutral arbitrator on a three-man panel. George Spater represented TWA. Bob Buck, ALPA’s representative, remembers the arbitration process as a very trying one:
Dealing with TWA was always difficult because there was constant turmoil in the executive suite. New people would come in and get hard-nosed and negotiations would drag out. If you look at the executives of Delta, for example, there isn’t a guy in any spot who hasn’t been there for 20 years, and that brings consistency, stability. On TWA we’d hear “bankruptcy” one day, then “things are getting better” the next. The Hughes takeover thing was boiling in 1946.
I knew being the principal arbitrator after that 1946 strike
wasn’t going to be easy. Most of my earlier work with ALPA had been on the
technical side. Dave called me at home and said Jim Roe and the boys wanted me
to be the arbitrator. I argued, then said OK. For three solid months I sat out
in
Copilot pay was a big issue. This was a transition period for the whole industry. Prior to that time the copilot had been considered an apprentice, much as I had been when the captain kept saying, “Don’t touch anything or I will break your arm.” We were claiming that the copilot was an important part of the crew, not just a trainee. The guy had to know how to fly the airplane. Back when I started, if the captain had died, I would have had a hell of a time getting back on the ground.
Well, the neutral in this case, Judge Swacker, was an old-fashioned guy well into his 70s, and he was convinced that the copilot was just an apprentice. We got down tight in the area of copilots’ pay, deciding how much money it was, and thinking of Swacker’s attitude, I took a big gulp and said, “OK, I’ll sign for that amount.” That night I went back to the ALPA group and they just tore me up and down. Next day we took it up to Judge Swacker. He was sitting in his room up in the Blackstone Hotel when we handed him the copilots’ settlement. The judge looked it over and said, “Bob, you sure screwed them.”
The strike settlement was at best a mixed bag, but it did provide for across-the-board pay increases. Essentially, Judge Swacker extended the old Decision 83 formula up to 300 miles per hour, made minor pay adjustments in each category, and set a minimum monthly figure for ICD. Many TWA pilots were unhappy with the settlement, while others accepted it as reasonable. Everyone found something to grumble about. “It isn’t all we wanted,” Bob Buck admitted to his fellow pilots, “but it’s upward, and for an international pilot it’s the highest salary paid anywhere on earth.” Buck estimated that the settlement would enable an eight-year captain flying 1,000 hours per year to earn $14,550.
By 1947, it began to dawn on some copilots that they might never make captain, that their number might never come up. On Pan American in particular, copilots with gray whiskers were becoming commonplace. If the industry continued to modernize, continually introducing ever faster and larger aircraft, promotion in the cockpit might cease on every airline. The specter of a lengthy career in the right seat loomed, and many copilots wanted to make that unpleasant prospect as financially secure as possible.
Consequently, the factor in the 1947 TWA arbitration that raised the most hackles was probably the settlement on copilot pay. Although it increased salaries, the settlement did nothing to change the old flat monthly salary system. Copilots in that era wanted increment pay based on a percentage of the captain’s pay, but that idea was still ahead of its time. Although no one could know it, the vexing problem of proper compensation was still years away from a solution, too. A great deal of internal turmoil lay in ALPA’s immediate future, some of it owing to the intractable nature of the opposition, some of it to the nature of Behncke’s leadership.
As 1947 dawned, many pilots were increasingly uneasy about Behncke, but the idea of bringing down this mighty old oak of a man was something everybody shrank from. Bob Buck tells why:
Dave was the greatest, but he was a man of his time, and his time ran out. He was a loner who had to know every single thing that was going on in ALPA. That was fine when it was small enough, but as the industry grew he couldn’t do this anymore. Dave didn’t know how to delegate authority, and this gave him a tremendous workload. He worked day and night, wore himself to a nub.
His handling of the TWA strike was OK as far as it went, but he just couldn’t drop everything for it. But he did, and consequently things weren’t getting done, particularly over on American where they had a lot of trouble.
It was during this period that the American guys started after Dave. Willis Proctor was after his job, and that bothered the hell out of Dave. He mustered his horses, and Proctor lost, but Proctor trying to get in was a recognition that Dave was not handling things well.
A little story about the
arbitration held that wintertime will illustrate it for you. I was domiciled in
He looked up and said, “My God, what are you going home for? We’re right in the middle of this thing.”
I said, “Dave, tomorrow’s Christmas.”