Chapter 18
The Southern Airways Strike of 1960
Frank
In early 1959, the SOU pilots
figured they were in for trouble. Their ALPA contract was in negotiation, and
they knew Hulse’s destruction of the mechanics’ union had made an easy
settlement unlikely. ALPA was now the last labor union on Frank Hulse’s
property. Seven years of Republican administration in
In
Fortunately for the pilots of every regional airline today, the SOU pilots stood firm against Frank Hulse’s attempt to reduce them to second-class economic citizenship. For the airline piloting profession, it was a turning point.
The fundamental issue at stake in 1960 was equal pay for equal work. Historically, one of ALPA’s most persistent quarrels was with the small airlines who argued that they couldn’t afford to pay the high salaries that AAL, Trans World Airlines (TWA), and the big boys paid. Dave Behncke made resistance to this notion the cornerstone of ALPA’s wage policy. ALPA has always insisted on the principle that the pilots of every airline, big or little, deserved the same pay for flying the same equipment. The smaller airlines never reconciled themselves to this idea, and from their beginning in the 1940s the new “feeders” paid substandard wages—at least until ALPA began (much to their surprise) to organize their pilots in the 1950s.
As a rule, the first ALPA contracts with the regionals were quite moderate. Clarence Sayen was a patient negotiator who was always willing to bargain. For first contracts with the regional airlines, Sayen was willing to accept inferior salary scales to win recognition of ALPA as the bargaining agent. He would be back later for better salaries. Frank Hulse knew this, but he had other ideas. Harry E. Susemihl, master executive council (MEC) chairman at the beginning of the strike, recalls:
He wanted the strike—he engineered it. But let me tell you, this same man, if he were to walk into my living room this evening, would be very personable. He was a very enigmatic personality, friendly one minute and distant the next. Before the strike, he always called me by my first name, even if he met me out on the street. But after the strike, it was different. Many people who worked for him felt as if they knew him. But I don’t think anybody really did, not any employee on any level. It’s my understanding that when he sold Southern to North Central, even his top executives didn’t find out through a personal phone call. He sent a courier over to the executive offices and played his message on a tape recorder, advising them that Southern Airways had been sold. I believe he was negatively affected by losing that strike to us in 1960. Mr. Hulse was not a good loser. In point of fact, we were pretty well beaten, economically, at that point. We had been out of work for more than two years, he was flying his routes, and he seemed to have won. We had to look for a solution in the political arena.
Nobody will ever know the full cost of the SOU strike of 1960. It was awfully high. ALPA spent over $2 million; SOU spent much more (and was technically bankrupt at one point during the strike). The federal government contributed nearly $10 million in direct subsidies to SOU during the strike. As we shall see, a substantial percentage of this huge outlay of taxpayers’ dollars went directly to support strikebreaking.
But how do we measure the cost of the SOU strike in human terms?
How can you put an honest price tag on the anguish of seeing a less qualified
pilot take your job, of two years of hassles and fistfights and quarrels with
local airport authorities over picketing rights, of having to make speeches to
hostile audiences in the deep South? The South in 1960 was not the kind of place
where people were sympathetic to strikers. Imagine what it must have been like
trying to explain the strike to the Chamber of Commerce in
“He never forgave us for
that,” says John Boyd, who retired from SOU in 1976 and who is called “Senator
John” because he spent so much time lobbying in
Mr. Hulse got a certificate late in World War II, but he did nothing with it until 1949. We got paid practically nothing at first, but in all fairness to Mr. Hulse, he really didn’t have it. A couple of our early pilots had worked for other airlines. They were the prime movers on getting us thinking about ALPA. People like Sam Buchanan, W. S. McGill, and Jack Kendall, who had worked for better wages on AAL, began talking up union, and we got an election and went ALPA. Sam Buchanan was later discharged for another reason, but I’m quite sure he was discharged for forming the union, if you understand what I mean. He later got killed flying corporate. Mr. Hulse didn’t want Buchanan on his property because he thought Sam had double-crossed him.
Most of the first batch of pilots, only about 50 of us, had known Mr. Hulse for years. We knew all the executives, people like George Estey, who was treasurer and who was my close personal friend. George is dead now, so I’m not going to hurt him by saying this, but he called me one night and said, “Listen, Mr. Hulse wants you to oppose forming the union.” I said, “George, I can’t do that; I have to go with the pilots.” George went back and told Mr. Hulse. After that, I found out I was no longer his friend; I was betraying him by going over to the union. That was the kind of atmosphere we were working under, and Mr. Hulse would have fired us all, I’m sure, except that under federal law he couldn’t. He also needed us because our routes were basically Memphis to Atlanta with stops at Birmingham, Ala., Tuscaloosa, Ala., Tupelo, Miss., and Columbus, Miss., smaller towns that didn’t even have paved runways, just grass cow pastures, mostly VFR [visual flight rules] flying. You couldn’t just bring anybody in to fly those routes; you had to know them real well.
During the mid-1950s, relations between the pilot group and SOU’s
management were decidedly cool, and salary scales lagged considerably behind the
national average. ALPA’s policy of raising wage rates on one airline at a time,
the familiar routine of “jacking up the house one corner at a time,” worked less
well on the regionals than on the majors because, although the majors received
some CAB subsidies during the 1950s, the regionals were almost totally dependent
on federal dollars. In that era of tight economic regulation, an airline’s
overall operating costs were closely scrutinized by the CAB. Airline management,
particularly on the regionals, had to go hat-in-hand to
CAB’s goal was to make the regionals independent of the federal dole, but that came very slowly. Optimistic assessments of the eventual profitability of regional airline services had pretty well stopped by the mid-1950s. Adding to their poor economic performance was the aging of the DC-3, still the standard aircraft on most regional airlines. The regionals had equipped themselves with cheap cast-off Threes from the majors in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the mid-1950s, they were wearing out, and obviously the regionals would soon have to start replacing them with modern equipment like the Martin and Convair twin-engine aircraft. That was going to require heavy financial outlays. The bankers exerted strong pressure on the regionals to cut costs and get their balance sheets in better order against the day when the banks would underwrite large loans for new equipment. ALPA’s wage policy on the majors, which already operated the new equipment the regionals must soon acquire, would make pilot compensation an even larger expense if ALPA could force the regionals to pay comparable scales.
That, in a nutshell, was why the regionals began resisting ALPA’s wage demands so strenuously in the late 1950s and why a nasty strike on one of them was inevitable. From ALPA’s point of view, pilot productivity was going to increase markedly once the DC-3 was phased out, but the time to start breaking the regionals to the harness of contemporary wage policy was before the new equipment arrived. The strategy of the famous wage policy guidelines adopted by the 1956 convention was to proceed gradually and peacefully.
Conversely, from the regional airlines’ point of view, the time to break ALPA was now, in the late 1950s, while the DC-3 was still in service and there was an abundance of pilots holding air transport ratings for it. To wait another year or two, until after the new equipment began arriving, would put ALPA in a commanding position and make strikebreaking impossible, since ALPA would command the loyalty of the only pilots capable of flying on short notice. Although a conspiracy is difficult to prove, every SOU pilot believes that the regional airlines did conspire to force a strike somewhere, simply because it was “now or never.” In addition, the regionals reasoned that ALPA was so embroiled in the nasty dispute with the Flight Engineers International Association (FEIA) that it wouldn’t be able to support a local strike on a small carrier effectively.
Clancy Sayen tried to avoid trouble by insisting that regional pilot groups seek only modest wage increases. Far better, Sayen believed, to concentrate on work rules rather than wages. Higher dollar amounts could come later, he reasoned, once new equipment was in operation. For the present, the smart thing to do was to win agreement on the principle of “trip rigs,” which were already in use by most of the major airlines. SOU, like all the regionals, still used old-fashioned block-to-block pay computation. Against this attempt to modernize the method of pilot compensation, the regional airlines closed ranks, as former MEC Chairman Harry Susemihl recalls:
We had complete confidence in Clancy Sayen. He wanted to pursue this as a classic labor dispute. But the company presented us with a “take-it-or-leave-it” package, and they had brought in an attorney to handle negotiations whose specialty was breaking labor unions. They were not negotiating in good faith. The opinion of Clancy Sayen, and of the Executive Committee, too, was that ALPA was being given an ultimatum by the regional carriers’ association. We felt pretty sure that a strike on one of the regional carriers was unavoidable. The judgment was that ALPA would be better off if the strike came on SOU because our pilot group was very nearly unanimous. I think we only had two nonmembers at the time the strike started. The other carriers had a much higher percentage of nonmembers. That is why the SOU pilot group won the dubious honor of going to the trenches on this one.
For nearly a year, from July 30, 1959, when SOU’s agreement came up for renewal, until June 5, 1960, when the strike began, SOU’s pilots were in almost constant negotiation and mediation, always hitting a brick wall. Hulse apparently believed that when push came to shove, his pilots would not walk out. He was also exploring the possibility of hiring scab replacements. When the SOU pilots finally notified the company that they had taken enough abuse and were therefore left with no alternative but to “withdraw from service” (in the quaint phraseology of the Railway Labor Act), SOU’s management moved immediately to hire replacement pilots. As Bill Himmelreich (or “H,” as his fellow SOU pilots called him) recalls, management fully expected the “new hires” to scab:
I was 30 years old, getting right on the border line as far as whether I would be employable. I was furloughed by EAL in March 1960. Those of us who were laid off first were lucky, because we got what few flying jobs were available. An EAL crew scheduler called me and said that he had heard through the grapevine that SOU was going to hire new pilots very shortly. He warned me that SOU was a Mickey Mouse little outfit, but he pointed out that EAL wasn’t always what it is today. Director of Personnel Everett Martin had told me during ground school that there would probably be a strike. He said to me, “In your case, with your background, we can make you a captain overnight.” It didn’t surprise me that right after the strike started, I got a message to call Everett Martin. I didn’t, although I’m usually very conscientious about returning phone calls. The union had asked the probationary copilots to come out with them, and we did.
Taylor Abernathy, currently base chief pilot for Republic
Airlines at
We had a vice-chairman named Al Hill, who was a very nice, low-key person, and he talked with the people who had been here just a few months. It was more or less expected of us to go out on strike. It was a big question mark, I think, from the company’s point of view, as to what we’d do. They really thought that we would stay. We reluctantly went out because Al Hill talked with us, but there was no pressure.
The new hires thought the strike would be short. In fact, the
first pickets turned out in a festive mood, and the temporary strike
headquarters in
Furthermore, the ALPA negotiating team was in temporary disarray owing to the death of Jim Pashkov, the staff negotiator Sayen had assigned full-time to the SOU case. Pashkov, in addition to being an attorney, was also a naval aviator. He was killed while flying a Reserve training mission when negotiations were at a critical point.
The SOU strikers began to realize that they were in for a long struggle when V. A. Knudegard and Wallace Wigley, chief pilots at the Atlanta and Memphis bases, respectively, resigned from SOU, refusing to be party to SOU’s unfair bargaining tactics. Wigley had been frantically trying to avert the strike, and he believed he had settled all the outstanding issues. But much to Wigley’s surprise, Hulse injected a new note into the negotiations. Like Ted Baker in 1948, Hulse demanded an end to seniority and the right to “discipline” leaders of the strike. That was too much for Wigley, who not only resigned, but angrily removed a sport coat given to him by Hulse and left it behind. ALPA added Wigley to its strike benefit fund, even though technically he was not eligible for it since he was not an ALPA member.
Wigley couldn’t know, nor could any of the other strikers, that
the pilots of Southeast Airlines, a small intrastate carrier in
“Morale was good at first,” says Phil Moss, who was on the
negotiating committee. “I can still remember meeting Wallace Wigley at the
airport after he had gone down to
“I told the guys at that time,” agrees John Boyd, “that the woods were full of the bodies of men who had underestimated Mr. Frank Hulse.”
Round one went to the strikers. The chairman of the
The most celebrated FAA
dereliction involved a scab named Hulihan, who had somehow wangled a job with
only a private license and no instrument rating. As the strike deepened, the SOU
pilots began setting up their own files on the scabs, doing the job FAA refused
to do, carefully checking the scabs’ backgrounds with an eye to discrediting
their competence. A contact in the FAA records section checked on Hulihan and
found that he held only a private license. By the time United Press
International’s Robert Serling broke the story, Hulihan was a captain. It
created a dandy stink. Hulihan was promptly fired, but his flying for several
months as a captain was an indictment of both SOU and FAA.
The SOU strike was simply too complex at all levels—at Memphis, Atlanta, Washington, and Chicago; in the legal system; in the stock market; and of course, ultimately, in politics—for any historian to do it justice. In some ways it was a repeat of the NAL strike of 1948, with the same techniques of banner-towing aircraft (“Don’t Fly Southern”), fights between scabs and strikers at the airports, minor vandalism to SOU’s property, and ALPA and SOU suing each other. But in some respects, the SOU strike was much harder because it went on so much longer. For example, although there were a few brief fisticuffs during the NAL strike, there was actually gunfire during the SOU strike. While assisting striking SOU pilots, Delta’s George F. Metts was wounded by a shotgun-toting scab.
The SOU strike broke out at a
bad time for ALPA. The FEIA dispute was in full flower, the major airlines were
gearing up to resist ALPA under their Mutual Aid Pact (in which they would
support each other financially during a strike), and the subsurface antagonism
toward Sayen by a substantial minority of the ALPA membership was about to
emerge. The financial burden of supporting the SOU strikers was heavy enough to
exacerbate other problems.
“There was no way of turning the SOU spigot off,” says Charley
Ruby, who became president during the final stages of the strike. “We had to try
to control the problem with a minimum of expense and still do a respectable
effort. Our financial situation was so precarious that I didn’t waste any time,
once I got to
One of the reasons the SOU strike cost so much was an ill-starred attempt to compete directly with SOU by running a rival airline. Superior Airlines, as the ALPA-sponsored outfit called itself, was an absolutely unique experiment in the annals of modern labor disputes. Superior operated eight-passenger de Havilland Doves in direct competition with SOU’s most profitable routes and departure times. It capitalized on public apprehension about Hulse’s strikebreakers, something that was much in the news by March 1961, owing to the Hulihan case and a couple of nonfatal accidents involving scabs. (FAA Administrator Halaby, stung by the bad publicity, publicly warned SOU to clean up its hiring, but he still maintained that the scabs were “qualified.”) Offering free champagne and intensely personal service, Superior Airlines tried to keep ALPA’s case before the public.
“Our purpose is to give good service and make money,” Jim
McCormick told the press. McCormick was
“In retrospect, Superior Airlines was a gross error,” Devine
says. “Sayen was forced into it. He was a pretty good businessman, and I doubt
that he ever thought it could be successful. A lot of our total expenditure for
that strike came from trying to run that airline, and it didn’t have much effect
on the settlement of the strike either. But we had to fight like that because
Hulse was trying to do what Wien tried in
Sayen was forced to try direct competition with Hulse because of a series of adverse court and CAB rulings. Initially, Sayen hoped that the threat of a boycott of all airports serving SOU would end the strike. There was substantial sentiment among the pilots of several airlines to simply refuse to fly into any picketed airport. The courts squelched this approach. The other avenue lay in ALPA’s charge that SOU had bargained unfairly by injecting into the negotiations a demand that “ringleaders” in the strike be “disciplined.” This was clearly illegal under the terms of the Railway Labor Act.
But in September 1961 CAB
Examiner William Cusick ruled in Frank Hulse’s favor, dismissing ALPA’s claims
of unfair bargaining. As far as Cusick was concerned, the SOU strike was now
over, and the strikers were permanently out. ALPA promptly appealed Cusick’s
ruling to the full CAB. Eventually, nearly two years later, this appeal would
bear the fruit that would defeat Frank Hulse. But this story contains another
one that involved politics at the highest level.
The SOU strikers had jumped into national politics by publicly endorsing John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential election. JFK was inclined to support them, but he had a few other things to contend with—like the possibility of World War III. Until vacancies occurred on CAB, it would continue to have a 3–2 Republican majority that had already shown itself to be hostile to ALPA in the SOU strike. Everything depended on JFK’s appointments to CAB.
Harry Susemihl puts it very succinctly: “If Richard Nixon had won in 1960, neither I nor any other SOU pilot would ever have worked again.” JFK owed his election to organized labor, and ALPA would now benefit from the AFL-CIO connection, as it had so many times in the past.
The unsung hero of the successful campaign to put a prolabor
member on CAB, which would shift the five-member board’s majority in favor of
the SOU strikers, was a nonpilot named Charlie Overholt. Early in the strike,
Sayen approved a request by the Memphis SOU pilots to put Overholt on their
payroll as a publicist. He had worked for the Memphis Union News, a local
AFL-CIO newspaper, so he knew labor’s ropes well. Overholt’s job was to run what
the SOU strikers labeled the “Labor Contact Program” to line up labor support.
It was entirely the idea of Jim Harper, the quiet, calm chairman of the
No one will ever be able to measure the impact of organized labor’s combined pressure on Congress and the president. If the pressure had not been constant and heavy, perhaps JFK might have tried to mollify the business community with his CAB appointment. Sacrificing a union local with a mere 140 members would be a small price to pay for better relations with businessmen. AFL-CIO pressure prevented it.
The problem on CAB was that
one of the Democrats, Alan S. Boyd, had previously proven hostile to the
interests of organized labor. In February 1961, when JFK made his first CAB
appointment, he named Robert T. Murphy, a
“The Kennedy administration proved very helpful to us in the Southern case,” says ALPA attorney Henry Weiss.
One person who made a lot of difference was Professor Nathan Feinsinger, whom Kennedy appointed to a special fact-finding board on the strike. The Feinsinger hearings were very important in bringing out some of the illegal bargaining tactics used by SOU and also in dramatizing the extent to which the federal government was underwriting the strike through its subsidies. This accumulation of evidence was very important in swinging a majority on CAB in our favor. I think it’s fair to say the SOU strike was resolved through a combination of pressures—political, legal, and financial.
The Feinsinger commission, named for Professor Nathan Feinsinger
of the
Finally, the Feinsinger commission got around to hearing the SOU case in March 1962. SOU’s principal witness was Earle Phillips, the attorney whose intransigence as a negotiator had created the strike in the first place. Phillips was obviously at pains to dodge key questions about SOU’s subsidy payments from CAB. Eventually, under the patient questioning of Feinsinger, Phillips was forced to admit that since the strike began CAB had paid SOU over $9 million!
This sum staggered Feinsinger, who wanted to know what effect these taxpayers’ dollars had on SOU’s ability to withstand the strike. Plenty, as it turned out. CAB’s chief counsel admitted under Henry Weiss’s cross-examination that it simply did not know how much went for strikebreaking.
“There is no breakdown of so much for strike expenses or so much for maintenance,” the CAB lawyer answered. How Frank Hulse spent the taxpayers’ money was none of CAB’s business, the lawyer insisted, so long as he rendered “honest and efficient service.”
Phil Moss, who was in
The question arose as to how they accounted for the way those monies were spent. There was a CAB representative on the stand, and he said he could care less how they were spent. Once the money left CAB, it went to the carrier, and if Mr. Hulse wanted to light his cigar with a $100 bill, then it was perfectly all right with them. And Feinsinger said, “Would you repeat that please?” And the guy immediately knew he had said the wrong thing.
The Feinsinger commission provided all the factual information that would be necessary to overturn the finding made by CAB Examiner Cusick in 1960. CAB finally considered ALPA’s appeal of Cusick’s decision in May 1962, 23 months into the strike. The outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion, however, for although JFK had appointed people to CAB who were known to be prolabor, once they were seated he had no further control over them. Moreover, for CAB to overturn Cusick’s findings would be a precedent—never before had CAB invoked its legal powers to determine whether an airline had “bargained in good faith.”
The history of CAB’s legal powers began with the Railway Labor Act of 1926, under which interstate carriers had to “exert every reasonable effort” to settle labor disputes. But the 1926 law gave the government no power (other than going to court) to force the carrier back into negotiations. Under the terms for the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 (as amended in the Federal Aviation Act of 1958), the airlines were required to comply with the provisions of the 1926 rail law. This gave CAB a power, called “cross-referencing,” to enforce provisions of law spelled out in other acts, even though they were not originally written to cover aviation. CAB did not have specific statutory power to intervene in labor disputes. But CAB did have the power to shoot SOU out of the skies by canceling its “certificate of convenience and necessity.” Without this certificate, SOU was not eligible for the CAB subsidy, and without the subsidy, it could not operate. Thus, through an indirect strategy mapped out by Henry Weiss, CAB could force SOU to negotiate with its strikers (not settle, merely negotiate).
In its final decision, CAB
noted that SOU’s prompt hiring of strikebreakers was evidence enough of “bad
faith” on SOU’s part. When SOU pilots, through the efforts of Wallace Wigley and
others, had settled all outstanding disputes and were ready to return to work,
they were prevented from doing so by Frank Hulse’s insistence on the right to
“discipline” strike leaders and to deprive them of seniority. “The demands of
Southern relating to seniority are illegal,” CAB stated flatly, for they
“contributed to the prolongation of the dispute,” in direct defiance of the 1926
Railway Labor Act. The crucial CAB ruling was made along straight party lines,
with Democrats Boyd, Murphy, and Minetti voting in favor, and Republicans Gurney
and Gillilland voting no.
Despite this favorable ruling, the issue was not yet firmly decided. ALPA promptly appealed the CAB decision to the courts. The reason for this apparent anomaly was that Henry Weiss feared SOU’s lawyers would appeal it, and he wanted to place it under the jurisdiction of a judge more sympathetic to organized labor than the southern judge that Hulse’s attorneys would likely choose. The court that receives an appeal first has jurisdiction. “We made sure the petition was dated and timed,” says Weiss. “Nobody who knew Frank Hulse believed he would quit.”
ALPA had one ace left in the hole, one that would eventually induce Hulse to surrender. Midway in the course of the strike, somebody mentioned to Clancy Sayen that ALPA had spent nearly enough on the strike to buy SOU. In fact, the dollar value of SOU’s outstanding stock wasn’t much more than the $2 million ALPA had already spent. So why not buy SOU? SOU’s stock on the open market was quite low in 1961, owing to Hulse’s purchase of a fleet of secondhand Martin 404s on credit. SOU was also just that much more vulnerable to CAB’s threat to cut off its subsidy, and this weakness gave ALPA’s national leaders the idea of buying up SOU stock to pressure Hulse further for a speedy settlement.
The stock purchase program was
the brainchild of
Hulse awakened to this threat simultaneously with the CAB ruling against him, when a Baltimore investment group holding nearly 30 percent of SOU’s common stock approached ALPA’s new president, Charles Ruby, and Treasurer Scotty Devine about a deal. Hulse was beaten now, and he knew it, so he gave up. There would be no more trouble, he let it be known, if ALPA would agree to sell him its SOU stock at market value. There would be no repeat of the post-strike hassles that the NAL pilots experienced in 1948. He would throw the scabs to the wolves, excepting only that they would come to work for him at the bottom of the seniority list when openings became available. Hulse was, in short, following the historical pattern of businessmen who make promises to scab pilots—the promises were good only so long as they were convenient. The scabs were now on their own, and nothing they could do would save their jobs. They tried forming their own union and filing suit against CAB, just like the NAL scabs had done in 1948. It didn’t work for them either.
And so the longest strike in ALPA’s history was over. The majority of the luckless scabs would never work for SOU again, despite Hulse’s earlier promises. Those few who managed to remain on SOU’s payroll must surely take small comfort that the high salaries they enjoy today were bought with the sweat and anguish of others.
“About 30 of them altogether managed to hang on,” says John Boyd, with more than a hint of disdain. “They were the kind of people who could convince themselves that there wasn’t anything wrong with what they did. The ones who couldn’t convince themselves were the ones who couldn’t take the pressure and quit.”
“A few of them were young when they scabbed,” says Bill Himmelreich, who was just as young himself. “I know that some of them would join if ALPA had a program like the typographers, where a man could get into the union after scabbing if he paid dues for the entire time that he scabbed and all the assessments. Several of them have told me that they’ll regret what they did for the rest of their lives, and if ALPA would let them in, they’d be down to see their bankers the next morning, ready to pay whatever it took.”
ALPA fought the SOU strike like there was no tomorrow. Something much more important was at stake than just a small strike on a small airline. In a sense, the 1960–62 strike was the Magna Carta of ALPA’s wage policy, and the struggle the SOU strikers waged in those years has paid dividends ever since for pilots of regional airlines.
Perhaps the final word on the SOU strike of 1960–62 is best spoken by Jim Harper, who was so deeply revered by his fellow SOU pilots. In an interview before his death, Harper put it all in perspective:
The pilots built SOU with their dedication. Management tried to destroy it with greed. It was a real shoestring operation in those days. We’d take company scrip in lieu of money, and on our off days we’d all load into an airplane and blitz a town. By that I mean we’d move into a community and try to sell SOU. We did it for free, on our own time. We built that airline. We put our guts into it. But we’d have gotten nothing out of it if it hadn’t been for ALPA. That’s why we pilots should be committed to the labor movement, perhaps more definitely than a plumber or a carpenter. ALPA is known, of course, as an “Association,” but we are part of the labor movement. We have to have union.