CHAPTER 6
In 1970, at the final BOD meeting Charley Ruby would preside over as ALPA’s
president, he made a farewell address that was oddly predictive of his
successor’s downfall a dozen years later. After eight embattled years, Ruby
could have selected from a wide array of troublesome issues as the focus of his
remarks. He chose pilot furloughs. “We have a fairly large income for a
small union, but you cannot dip both arms in that pot and come out in the
black,” Ruby warned the delegates.
Furloughs, Ruby told the BOD, created a
“crisis of sympathy” for the pilots losing their jobs and had the potential to
threaten ALPA’s financial stability. Ruby, whose professional career began in
the days of seasonal layoffs, saw furloughs as a normal but
temporary aspect of the
professional pilot’s experience. In fact, he expressed great sympathy for
managers who had to make these furlough decisions, and he spoke out strongly for
cooperation with the airline industry in such matters. Ruby’s expression of a
“managerial mentality,” while not totally lacking concern for the plight of
furloughed pilots and their families, was at least a bit old-fashioned. It was
also symptomatic of the “You ain’t a
realairline pilot ’till you’ve been furloughed” syndrome so typical of
his era. But signs of change were appearing.
During the heady expansion of the 1960s, a new generation of airline pilots,
mostly hired owing to the government’s support of ALPA’s three-crewmember
policy, had come to see furloughs as anything but routine. Consequently, Ruby’s
warning that ALPA’s finances would suffer if the delegates tried to do too much
to help furloughed pilots stirred mutterings among some delegates. Talk about
fiscal restraint was all well and good for Charley Ruby, as he rode off into the
sunset with a comfortable retirement package; but the larger question remained
unanswered. What was ALPA’s
responsibility to members of the profession who lost their jobs? Of all the headaches O’Donnell would
inherit from Ruby, furloughs were the most debilitating. For Ruby, this problem
would require only a couple of aspirins and the stern warning he left as his
legacy in 1970. But for O’Donnell, furloughs would become a full-fledged
migraine. The problem with furloughs wasn’t just the lost dues revenue to ALPA,
as some cynics suggested. The problem went much deeper, to the very core of the
professional airline pilot’s image of himself as a stable, respected, and
prosperous member of the upper middle class. Take away the profession from which
most airline pilots derived their sense of self-worth, and ALPA would inevitably
become a tempting target for blame and criticism, as would whoever happened to
be ALPA’s president at the time.
“The guy who loses his job or is being
furloughed doesn’t think rationally,” J.J. O’Donnell sighed in his 1991
interview. “He says ’Goddamn it, why didn’t you, why didn’t ALPA, do something to protect my
job!’”
The furlough issue would trouble ALPA
well into the postderegulation era, and it would attain new significance as the
great merger crisis of the 1980s unfolded. But in 1970, at a time when questions
of “fragmentation policy” and “scope clauses: were mostly abstractions, the
furlough issue seems, in retrospect, relatively trivial. But it struck
contemporary observers as quite serious. While ALPA membership had doubled from
14,000 in 1965 to 28,000 in 1970, the number of pilots on furlough by then had
increased 10-fold, to 880. Even in an era when being furloughed was looked upon
as a routine part of the airline business, these numbers alarmed many pilots.
Imagine the crisis O’Donnell faced in
1982, when the number of airline pilots out of work jumped by more than 2,000
from the Braniff collapse alone! And these pilots weren’t just furloughed—they
were part of a mass “termination” unlike anything in ALPA’s history. What did
ALPA owe the Braniff pilots, and how could O’Donnell dodge this bullet?
As we have seen, O’Donnell had coped
successfully with political crises before. If he chose to run for an
unprecedented fourth term as ALPA’s president in 1982, he would, as an
incumbent, have enormous resources to counterbalance the negative baggage he had
accumulated over the previous 12 years. Coming less than a year before he would
have to face reelection, O’Donnell knew that the Braniff bankruptcy would be a
political problem, but he did not think it an insurmountable one. At the time of
Braniff’s bankruptcy, he had not yet formally declared his candidacy, and he
kept his intentions to himself.
With his usual flair, O’Donnell pacified
a majority of the Braniff MEC by the kind of “hands on” personal touch at which
he was a master. Friends and foes alike agree that in dealing with small groups,
O’Donnell was a formidable operator. But with larger groups, particularly at one
step removed from personal contact, O’Donnell often appeared stiff and brusque.
The volume of angry letters from rank-and-file Braniff pilots indicated that he
was vulnerable on this count.
Part of the hostility Braniff’s line
pilots displayed toward O’Donnell stemmed from the fact that he kept a
relatively low profile. This shying away caused more than one Braniff pilot to
express the feeling that O’Donnell and ALPA were abandoning them to their fate.
“The Braniff pilots were like all
rank-and-file pilots, in that they did not understand that the president of ALPA
doesn’t have the muscle they think he has,” says Howard Cole, who as Braniff MEC
chairman after Joe Baranowski, almost singlehandedly kept ALPA alive during the
nearly two years after 1982. “Our pilots felt put upon, cannibalized by our
brethren at Eastern; and that left a very bitter taste. Because O’Donnell was an
Eastern pilot, he got a lot of the blame. When I took over as master chairman,
the Braniff membership in good standing was less than 20 percent.”
O’Donnell’s financial support for the
Braniff MEC was never in doubt. At the May 1982 Executive Board, the Braniff MEC
received an emergency grant of $50,000 to continue routine representational
activities. Subsequently, the Executive Committee authorized nearly $500,000 to
support the Braniff MEC in its various activities, which included an 800 number
“hot line” that kept the airline’s pilots abreast of the latest developments.
But the fate of Braniff’s pilots was only
one of several contentious issues nagging at O’Donnell, and with an election
coming, minimizing their plight and distancing himself from it was good
politics. But more to the point, O’Donnell believed that Braniff would emerge
from bankruptcy, resume operations, and the crisis would solve itself.
Consequently, he saw no need to rush into unfamiliar terrain. To implement the
kind of “crash program” of employment assistance many Braniff pilots were urging
upon him was precisely the kind of thing Charley Ruby had warned about.
That things would pan out, at least temporarily, just the way O’Donnell
predicted earned him little credit among unemployed Braniff pilots at the time.
When Hank Duffy took over ALPA’s
presidency in January 1983, he would find a bulging file of letters from Braniff
pilots asking for assistance. Many of these letters were rife with the personal
tragedy of divorce, lost homes, and shattered lives. Unemployed Braniff pilots
wanted many things from ALPA, among them “strike benefits.” These letters
repeated a familiar refrain—loyal dues-paying members who had never asked for
anything from ALPA before needed help. What about a loan equal to the dues they
had paid in over the years? But Braniff wasn’t on strike, and ALPA’s
Constitution and By-Laws had no way to help them financially with loans.
“When people can’t get jobs, when they
have everything on the line and they see it all going down the drain, they want
some place to vent their emotions,” says Dick Goduti, who would become Braniff’s
“custodial representative” following “Bankruptcy II” in 1989. “ALPA was an easy
target when they got to the point where there was nobody else to blame.”
But the Braniff pilots
did have one legitimate
complaint. Above all else, they wanted ALPA to somehow force the government into complying with the “first
right of hire” provisions of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. While
O’Donnell had indeed quietly
supported the Braniff MEC financially, to ordinary line pilots this form of aid
was almost invisible. What they really wanted was new jobs, which seemed to be
their right under the law. In this critical area, which involved directly
pressuring the Reagan administration for first-right-of-hire, O’Donnell was
strangely silent.
“I don’t know if J.J. had some
understanding with Ray Donovan [Reagan’s Secretary of Labor], but for some
reason he never pushed the Labor Department to post its [first-right-of-hire]
regulations,” Duffy insists. “Until they issued the regulations, we could do
nothing. We had to start from scratch, trying to get the Secretary of Labor to
post the regulations.”
As we have seen, the “Reagan Revolution"
began with a crusade to “get the government off the backs of the American
People.” To this end, President Reagan announced that he was canceling all
“unnecessary government regulations.” The first-right-of-hire regulations issued by his predecessor, Jimmy
Carter, under the terms of the Airline Deregulation act of 1978, fell victim to
the Reagan cancellations. In the March 1981 issue, Air Line Pilot
reported that the cancellation was “to give the new Reagan administration a
chance to make any changes it might deem necessary.”
First-right-of-hire regulations spelled
out the implementation procedures governing the labor protective provisions
(LPPs) of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Government intervention in
situations like this, historically called employee protective provisions (EPPs),
typically applied to businesses over which the government had regulatory or
oversight authority. As ALPA had experienced them previously, these regulatory
activities applied mostly to mergers, like the Allegheny–Mohawk union of 1972.
The deregulation LPPs were new in that
they required an existing airline to hire, on a
preferential basis, pilots who had lost their jobs because
of deregulation. The problem with this legislation was that it first required
the President, through his administrative subordinates, to “find” that
deregulation was the cause of the airline’s bankruptcy and
then to issue a set of administrative guidelines iimplementing
procedures for first-right-of-hire. An airline was not obligated to hire pilots
it didn’t need under the 1978 act, but any pilot who couldn’t get a job within a
10-year limit that Congress imposed had the right to compensatory payments from
the federal government.
“It took years for the Department of
Labor to implement first-right-of-hire because the companies fought it like
hell, they thought it was going to cost them millions,” O’Donnell explained in
1991 about the long LPP delay.
“Congress wrote a law that was in my opinion
watered down, almost worthless, and worded in such a way that the Department of
Labor was the scapegoat.”
In the 1991 interview, O’Donnell blamed
the utter failure of the LPPs as a job-protection device on congressional
Democrats, particularly Senators Howard Cannon and Edward M. Kennedy, who
chaired the committees that drafted the legislation. He also criticized airline
management for thwarting the LPPs. O’Donnell offered no criticism of either
Ronald Reagan or Ray Donovan. Because O’Donnell would later serve as Under
Secretary of Labor under Reagan, his disclaimers are at best disingenuous, and
many of O’Donnell’s critics believed at the time he was “playing politics” with
the LPP issue.
“I have no doubt that John O’Donnell was
job hunting with the Reagan people almost from the moment they took office,”
says Merle C. “Skip” Eglet of Northwest, who served as an ALPA executive
vice-president at the time. “I have no direct knowledge that he was delaying the
LPPs for that purpose, but it would not surprise me. There wouldn’t have been
any negative political fallout within ALPA, because at the time, in 1981, the
LPPs just weren’t an issue. After Braniff’s bankruptcy in 1982, of course, they
would be.”
As we have seen, by the time of
“Operation USA” in 1981, O’Donnell had become very close to the new Republican
administration. He obviously wanted to maintain that relationship and build upon
it. Had O’Donnell pushed aggressively for implementation of the LPPs, his action
probably would have alienated Reagan topsiders and almost certainly would have
damaged his standing with them. So, out of either personal ambition and
political expediency, or conversely, a sincere belief that “staying on the right
side” of the Reagan administration best served ALPA’s interests, O’Donnell opted
for a low-key approach to implementation of LPPs.
No one but O’Donnell himself knows
for sure what his motivation
was, and in all fairness, we must remember that the LPPs that Braniff’s pilots
would shortly need so much were not an issue until later. At the time of the
Reagan administration’s sidelining of the LPPs, few airline pilots had any
interest in them. During the months leading up to the Braniff bankruptcy, only
two relatively small airlines, Air New England and Airlift International, whose
pilot groups totaled barely 100, would theoretically have benefited from the
LPPs. But when Hank Duffy took over from O’Donnell in January 1983, the LPPs
regulations were still in administrative limbo.
“We started working on Ray Donovan pretty
hard,” says Hank Duffy of his first months in office. “We finally got him to
post the LPP regulations, but then the airlines tied it up in court. We
eventually won it, but it took years.”
After nearly three years of delay, the
Reagan administration finally succumbed to ALPA’s pressure and published the LPP
regulations. Fifteen airlines promptly sued to halt their implementation. In May
1984, a federal court further delayed implementation of the LPPs because the
Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 contained a “legislative veto” designed to
oversee and limit the President’s administration of the law. The Supreme Court
had previously ruled that such limitations were unconstitutional, but Congress
believed that its LPP wording in Section 43 of the deregulation act would pass
muster. This provision was in the law because congressional Democrats feared the
adverse effect of deregulation on their labor constituents and distrusted the
labor policies of the current Carter administration, not to mention of future
Republican administrations.
This attempt to protect labor from the
effects of deregulation backfired, much to the dismay of airline pilots, who
stood to benefit from it more than any other occupational group. But the
original prolabor intentions of Section 43 were clear. In the absence of
Reagan’s support for the LPPs, all ALPA could tell pilots who lost their jobs
because of deregulation was to continue asking employers for “special
consideration” under first-right-of-hire provisions. Meanwhile, ALPA appealed
the court decision and eventually prevailed, but not until 1987. It was a hollow
triumph—the statutory 10-year limit on the LPPs associated with the deregulation
act of 1978 had run out.
“I am not sure anybody ever got hired
because of first-right-of-hire,” says Hank Duffy frankly.“But it was a fight
worth making.”
As for the compensation due to pilots who
lost their jobs because of deregulation, not one Braniff pilot (or any other
airline pilot, for that matter) has ever received a penny.
The Department of Labor’s long delay in
issuing the regulations meant that it would be years before Congress could
appropriate money for that purpose. By 1987, when the administrative and legal
systems had finally finished with the LPPs, the federal budget was deeply in
deficit and had no money to spare. Congress and the President had mutually
agreed to understate the deficit by the sham of refusing to spend money in
federal “trust fund”; among these were taxes that passengers paid for the
specific purpose of airport improvements. In this financial environment, neither
Congress nor the President showed interest in appropriating money to compensate
airline pilots.
Ironically, in several lawsuits that
Braniff pilots brought, judges would later rule that Braniff had indeed failed
because of deregulation. So the Braniff pilots were entitled to compensation
under the LPPs, but no money was available to pay them—the final “Catch 22.”
As for O’Donnell, he was playing his
political cards very close to the vest in early 1982, emphasizing his
“connections” with political leaders and his “quiet clout” with them. So in
fairness to him, the decision to soft-peddle the Braniff collapse was consistent
and intellectually defensible. While many Braniff pilots pilloried O’Donnell and
all his works, an influential segment, particularly among the Braniff MEC,
worked hard to counter their attacks, thus insulating him from damage somewhat.
In any case, the
direct political impact of the Braniff pilots at the BOD
meeting in 1982 would be minimal, because owing to their unique situation, they
were granted only “observer” status, which meant they were not permitted to
vote. In addition, the fact that the Braniff pilots had high hopes of getting
their airline back into the air further ameliorated the tension. But Braniff’s
pilots were the ghost at the banquet in 1982, and their presence as “observers”
was a visible reminder to every delegate that the unthinkable was now
possible—airline pilot furloughs might
not be just temporary, after all.
“We didn’t even debate Braniff that
much,” recalls Hank Duffy. “At that point, everybody thought it was an isolated
thing, not the trend for the future.”
And in fact, Braniff would revive,
metamorphosizing into “New Braniff” (or Braniff II), on March 1, 1984. This
rebirth was largely the work of two retired Braniff pilots, Jack Morton and Glen
Shoop, plus one active pilot, Jack Murdoch.
A more overtly political problem, the
PATCO strike of 1981, provides another view of just how tricky the furlough
issue could be. When the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went
on strike against the federal government in August 1981, many pilots were so
incensed at O’Donnell’s handling of it that they mounted a serious effort to
recall him from office.
Because of the profound dislocations the PATCO strike might cause in the working
environment of airline pilots, O’Donnell necessarily had to involve himself in
it. The restrictions on airline operations that the PATCO strike generated
almost certainly played a role in the bankruptcy of some small carriers, notably
Air New England, and might well have aggravated the troubles of others,
including Braniff. For O’Donnell, the PATCO strike was almost a match for
Braniff—neither crisis, no matter what he did, was likely to win him many
friends.
ALPA and PATCO had a symbiotic
relationship in that both worked inside a mutually dependent system. Like most
such relationships, it had deep internal tensions that often erupted into
outright fissures. Many airline pilots saw PATCO as irresponsibly aggressive,
while many PATCO members viewed pilots as pampered prima donnas. This friction
often showed in the verbal mannerisms of pilots and controllers when they dealt
with each other. “On the frequency” conversations were often characterized by
brusqueness, sarcasm, and even outright nastiness. As a committed trade
unionist, O’Donnell tried mightily to create an atmosphere of mutual cooperation
between PATCO and ALPA. His efforts generated an irate reaction from many
airline pilots.
“Some pilots gave the controllers fits,”
O’Donnell reflected sadly in 1991. “We had pilots who just continually rubbed
salt in the controllers’ wounds and ridiculed them for wanting a starting pay
equivalent to a pilot’s. By the same token, we had some controllers who didn’t
treat pilots right. We tried every way in the world to build a positive
relationship with PATCO, running articles in Air Line Pilot about them,
because a lot of them are good people.”
A valid professional conflict underlay
the hostility between airline pilots and air traffic controllers. Put simply, it
came down to the question of authority. Pilots have historically disliked giving
up their “command authority” to anybody. The nature of the modern ATC system
meant that as the airline industry developed, air traffic controllers would
inevitably assume de facto “command authority” in many situations. PATCO owed its origins
partly to the feeling of many controllers that their “job” did not receive the same respect as airline pilots’
“profession.”
But in another sense, a purely
psychological rift existed between pilots and controllers, one that was
primarily sociological in origin. Typically, controllers learned their trade in
the military as enlisted personnel who were under the command of pilot officers.
When PATCO began stressing the similarity of their responsibilities, even going
so far as to suggest that controllers should receive “equal pay for equal work,”
many airline pilots heartily disagreed. Who did these ex-enlisted men think they
were?
During the long buildup to the PATCO
strike, the controllers’ tactics against the federal government earned them the
enmity of a clear majority of airline pilots. While many airline pilots,
particularly those “nuts and bolts” types who specialized in ATC problems, felt
the controllers had legitimate grievances, these sympathies did not extend to
PATCO, its leadership, or most importantly, its tactics.
On at least two occasions before 1981,
PATCO members demonstrated their unhappiness with the FAA and its administrator,
Langhorne Bond, by “working to the book.” This tactic, which airline pilots had
occasionally used themselves, might at first glance seem to fall within
acceptable parameters. But PATCO’s case was different. When pilots used the
“slowdown” as a tactic, it was against their private employers and affected
nobody else. When PATCO engaged in a slowdown, it was against the
U.S. government—an inappropriate and unpatriotic action, in the opinion of many
airline pilots. But far worse, a PATCO slowdown damaged other people, most
directly the airlines that pilots depended on for a living. For example, during
a one-day slowdown in August 1980 at a single airport, Chicago’s O’Hare, PATCO cost the airlines
almost a million dollars in excess fuel alone. And pilots had one more reason to
be unlikely to support a walkout by PATCO—strikes by federal employees were
illegal!
Questions of legality aside, strikes are
traditionally about muscle—politically, economically, and morally. An element
within PATCO believed that if it could hold its 13,000 members on the picket
line, they could shut down the nation’s air transportation system and force the
government to meet their demands. FAA Administrator Langhorne Bond, the Carter
appointee with whom ALPA also had differences, warned PATCO’s leaders that their
demands were excessive and that he would crack down hard on them if they went on
strike.
In January 1981, shortly before the
Reagan administration took office, Bond explicitly told PATCO that the FAA had a
contingency plan in place to break a controllers’ strike. Bond warned PATCO that
the FAA’s plan involved the use of military personnel, hiring “permanent
replacements,” and aggressive criminal prosecution designed to force strikers to
cross the picket line. Bond also warned PATCO’s leaders that despite their
endorsement of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign, they should not expect more
lenient treatment from incoming Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis. Bond’s
warning was prophetic, and his disgust with PATCO’s leadership was one of the
few things he and J.J. O’Donnell agreed upon.
By early 1981, a more radical element had
replaced much of PATCO’s original leadership. Barely a week before the strike,
Robert Poli displaced John Leyden, a man O’Donnell had known and respected since
before assuming ALPA’s presidency. In fact, O’Donnell’s relationship with PATCO
had become quite close during John Leyden’s tenure. When Poli tricked
Leyden into resigning, the nature of O’Donnell’s relationship with
PATCO changed.
“I had ten years of excellent
relationships with PATCO through John Leyden,” O’Donnell said in 1991. “I knew
him very well socially, we were on TV together, and we filed several joint
lawsuits. I brought him to every ALPA convention. But Bob Poli and his radicals,
who wanted to jump controllers’ pay from $23,000 to $55,000, replaced
Leyden in July because he was a peacemaker who
opposed striking in violation of federal law.”
Owing to O’Donnell’s rise within the
ranks of organized labor to a vice-presidency of the Executive Council of the
AFL-CIO, he became, in effect, George Meany’s troubleshooter and ambassador
plenipotentiary to other airline unions. He enjoyed a similar relationship with
Lane Kirkland, Meany’s successor. The AFL-CIO looked to O’Donnell as a mediating
influence on PATCO because of his long friendship with John Leyden. On one
occasion, Leyden had invited O’Donnell to address the PATCO convention in
Honolulu. But Bob Poli was not John Leyden.
“In February 1981, John Leyden warned me
that Bob Poli and the radicals were planning an illegal strike,” O’Donnell
recalled 1991. “I told John not to expect airline pilots to honor PATCO’s picket
line because the great majority of pilots were angry at the controllers. I said,
‘If you have a strike, my guys will run over you; they’ll fly every damned
flight.’”
During a May 1981 meeting between Poli,
Leyden, and O’Donnell, with Jack Bavis present, Poli announced that PATCO would
have a strike that was a “set up,” in that it would have the silent support of
the Reagan administration, which would use it as cover to meet their demands.
Poli insisted that he had a commitment from Reagan owing to PATCO’s endorsement
of his candidacy in 1980 and that the strike would be short.
“I said, ‘Bob, you’re smoking a pipe,’”
O’Donnell recalled later.
“I believe some of Reagan’s people said they’d do
that, I really do; but a commitment like that would never have come from him.
And I don’t think they ever said they’d give in or were going to solve PATCO’s
problems. They said they were going to look into them, see what they could do.
Stupid leadership—that was Bob Poli.”
Ben Cleveland, a former Marine fighter
pilot who helped found PATCO before moving into FAA management, confirms that
ordinary PATCO members were tricked into going on strike by Poli’s
misrepresentation of Ronald Reagan’s position:
“I attended a meeting at Phoenix
just before the strike at which a regional vice-president of PATCO assured us
that the strike was an ‘inside deal,’ that it would be short and just for show,
theater really, to give Reagan the excuse to cave in to us.
“I was already a supervisor at the
time,” Cleveland recalls, “and I knew it had to be another pile of Bob Poli’s
bullshit. The word was out in management that if those guys went out on strike,
they were going to be fired, and no kidding! By then I was not in PATCO, just a
friendly observer. I warned—nobody listened.”
O’Donnell, because of his close contacts
with the Reagan people, also knew that Poli was either lying or a fool. Ronald
Reagan came to the White House committed to a radical restructuring of American
society, and one of his targets was organized labor. He clearly meant to
dismantle what he called “the welfare state,” because he saw it as a drag on
economic growth. Reagan had noble goals, best summed up in his cheery slogan, “A
rising tide lifts all boats,” to explain how he believed economic growth would
cure America’s ills. But implicit in the “supply side” economics that Reagan espoused was the
notion that any institution that hampered the free flow of market economics was
counterproductive. Traditionally, conservatives have viewed labor unions as a
drag on economic growth, a dead weight carried on entrepreneurial backs.
Furthermore, conservatives have long believed that governmental favoritism was
the base upon which organized labor’s power rested. In short, organized labor
would clearly be one target of the Reagan Revolution. Bob Poli completely
misunderstood this fact.
But J. J. O’Donnell did not. In late
July, at a national meeting of PATCO’s Executive Board, the radicals and their
opponents fought it out. With the strike issue hanging in the balance, Bob Poli
engineered an internal coup that ousted John Leyden. O’Donnell followed these
events with great interest.
“As they were flying to Chicago for a
special meeting of the PATCO Executive Board and their Negotiating Committee,
Poli says to John Leyden, ‘Let’s you and I resign in protest and say we’re not
going to strike.’” O’Donnell recounts. “This Executive Board wanted to strike.
So Poli convinced Leyden to resign as president, but then Poli didn’t!”
When PATCO’s Executive Board named Poli
to replace Leyden, Poli then proceeded to set
the strike date for the first week of August 1981. With O’Donnell warning him
that ALPA would not support the strike, Poli agreed to delay it until after a
meeting with the AFL-CIO Executive Council in Chicago on August 2. PATCO, ignoring the
advice of the AFL-CIO to rethink their strike plans, on the following day, Aug.
3, 1981, walked out and threw up picket lines at O’Hare. Lane Kirkland was
unhappy about it, but he would not cross PATCO’s picket line. He canceled his
return flight, rented a car, and drove to his home in
Washington, D.C.
“They had picket lines set up at the base
of the control tower at O’Hare, but not at the airport,” O’Donnell says.
“I got on an airplane and came back to Washington. I was trying to stop this stupid strike.”
O’Donnell had been talking to Drew Lewis
regularly for months and knew that the Reagan administration would give PATCO no
quarter. O’Donnell also knew that rank-and-file airline pilots would cheer
PATCO’s destruction, no matter that it might do some damage to themselves in the
process. This fact left O’Donnell with a classic dilemma. Getting the PATCO
strike settled as soon as possible was in everybody’s interest. But to mediate
the strike, to act as an effective go-between, O’Donnell would have to appear
conciliatory to both sides. His private sympathies were, of course, entirely
opposed to PATCO, and particularly Bob Poli, whom he considered an unreliable
radical. But O’Donnell couldn’t let his distaste show.
Had O’Donnell been left alone, he might
well have engineered a compromise that would have settled the strike and
salvaged the professional careers of thousands of hapless PATCO members. As we
have seen, O’Donnell was a gifted negotiator and conciliator whose contacts with
all parties were intimate. He spoke with the authority of his AFL-CIO
vice-presidency and his friendship with John Leyden (whom he would later offer
an ALPA job, after Poli had engineered his ouster from PATCO). O’Donnell had
access to the top levels of PATCO, while simultaneously remaining on close terms
with Drew Lewis, the Reagan administration’s point man in the PATCO strike.
But circumstances and bad luck prevented
O’Donnell from stopping the PATCO strike. A hostile reaction developed among
many ALPA members, who saw O’Donnell’s efforts at conciliation as favorable to
PATCO. Put simply, most ALPA members wanted PATCO figuratively strung up by its
heels. Should O’Donnell persist in his efforts, the political fallout within
ALPA would be costly. Although August was far too early to announce his
candidacy for reelection to a fourth term as ALPA’s president, O’Donnell’s
political antennae were nevertheless up. He had no intention of suffering
political damage within ALPA because of the stupidity of PATCO’s leaders.
“I’d say 70 percent of ALPA members were
ultraconservative Republicans,” O’Donnell said in 1991. “But I also knew that
the PATCO strike had the potential of losing large numbers of them their jobs
for a period of six months or a year, as they hired and trained new controllers.
The only thing I wanted was to make sure I didn’t lose people to layoffs. I was
scared of losing 20 percent of our members to layoffs—then there would be big
trouble because we didn’t do something to stop the strike.”
On Aug. 5, 1981, just two days into the
PATCO strike, at precisely the moment when O’Donnell could have been most
effective at mediating an end to it, his enemies inside ALPA struck. The Eastern MEC, at
the urging of his archenemy of many years’
standing, Augie Gorse, passed a resolution condemning O’Donnell’s activities in
the PATCO strike. The resolution accused O’Donnell of “favoring” PATCO and
called for his resignation. O’Donnell, sensing the mischief his enemies could
make for him politically with such charges, withdrew from active involvement in
the effort to end the PATCO strike. Even a direct appeal from Drew Lewis, who
had come to rely on O’Donnell, failed to get him back into the fray.
“That Eastern MEC resolution criticizing me for supporting the controllers was a beauty,”
O’Donnell said angrily in his 1991 interview. “I had done just the opposite.”
Shortly thereafter, Secretary of
Transportation Drew Lewis, with whom O’Donnell had conferred repeatedly on the
PATCO strike, called to ask for help. Lewis particularly wanted to know Bob
Poli’s whereabouts, since he had gone into hiding.
“Drew Lewis asked me to communicate with
Poli,” O’Donnell says. “I told him I was not a mediator, that I was not a friend
of Poli’s, and I suggested that he call John Leyden and gave him the phone
number. But John was still so angry at that double-cross by Poli that he
wouldn’t help. So Lewis called back and asked if I had any suggestions. I says
‘Yeah, I got a suggestion. Let’s all go fishing.’”
O’Donnell was now under dire political
stress within ALPA, and he dared not take any further active role in the attempt
to settle the PATCO strike. But he did delegate full authority to Jack Bavis and
sent him into battle. This approach, although politically expedient, also made
sense, because Bavis had developed something of a friendship with Bob Poli.
“O’Donnell did get involved in the PATCO Strike, even though the
Executive Council hadn’t approved it,” Jack Bavis says of his mission to Poli.
“He sent me to be his personal intermediary with Bob Poli. J.J. did this because
he had developed a friendship with Drew Lewis, who needed to know what was
taking place inside PATCO and under what conditions Poli would take the strike
down. Lewis trusted O’Donnell to communicate with PATCO back and forth. For
example, I carried the message to Poli that if he would resign and say that he
made a mistake, Lewis would take all his people back. Poli refused. It was the
worst case we saw of a union leader who sacrificed his troops even when he knew
they were going to be defeated and replaced.”
And so the PATCO tragedy played itself
out. Using a combination of military controllers, crossovers, and supervisory
personnel, the ATC system limped along while “permanent replacements” were hired
and trained to take over for the PATCO strikers. The FAA drastically reduced
access to the ATC system for many months; and while the hardship on general
aviation was enormous, the airlines came out better than anyone had hoped. The
mass layoffs that O’Donnell had feared did not materialize.
Once the Reagan administration decided to
break PATCO, only one thing could have saved it—ALPA’s direct intervention. The
only rubric under which ALPA would have honored PATCO’s picket lines was safety.
On Aug. 19, 1981, O’Donnell laid that possibility to rest. At a press conference
in Washington, D.C., he refuted charges made by striking
PATCO members that the system was unsafe. Armed with an Executive Board
resolution affirming that the ATC system was functioning safely “under reduced
capacity,” O’Donnell explained to a large gathering of news media that ALPA’s
Air Traffic Control Committee was closely monitoring the situation.
“I have 33,000 members flying the system,
reporting from all over the country at all major traffic hubs,” O’Donnell said.
“I can say without equivocation that the ATC system is safe.“O’Donnell went on
to blast Poli, thus giving the Reagan administration public assurance that ALPA
would not rescue PATCO. Actually, O’Donnell had already privately assured Drew
Lewis that ALPA would not step into the fight.
“On the tenth of August, Drew Lewis
called me about rumors that we were going to start honoring PATCO’s picket
lines,” O’Donnell recalled later. “I told Drew very candidly that if I told my
people to honor those picket lines, they’d run over
me!”
Despite O’Donnell’s best efforts, his
handling of the PATCO strike was very damaging to him. With Eastern’s MEC
savagely denouncing him, O’Donnell felt under more pressure than he had ever
been before. In the autumn 1981 Executive Board, O’Donnell would face a
formidable recall movement, spearheaded by his own Eastern
MEC. To forestall it, O’Donnell gave what many observers took to be
a promise that if they would reject Eastern’s recall resolution, he would not
stand for reelection in 1982.
The O’Donnell era seemed to be over. But
it wasn’t—not quite.
O’DONNELL’S DILEMMAS
The PATCO Strike, Braniff, and Furloughs