American Airlines pilots' strike - 21 February 1997

There are times – they’re rare – when while dramatic things have just happened, I find myself haunted by something that just failed to happen, something which, the more you think about it, could have marked a decisive event, a joy, a catastrophe, or perhaps an unnoticed change in the way society is going.

I think most people at some time say to themselves what many writers have thought of writing up in a book called If. Maybe there is such a book; maybe more than one.

If Hitler had not listened to Goering, if he’d invaded Britain soon after Dunkirk, what would Britain, what would the world be like now? If Edward VIII had missed the party at which he met Wallis Warfield Simpson. If Lee Trevino had not desperately chipped in from a gorse bush and seen the ball hop miraculously into the hole, would Tony Jacklin’s career not have collapsed?

Well even though the world’s number one dictator has just died and two astronauts have ambled off urbanely into open space to install two new parts in the Hubble telescope, I want to talk this time about something that was going to happen by midnight last Friday – something the White House was not going to stop until the president and two close advisers thought again about the huge and possibly disastrous economic consequences and stepped in.

The president stopped the pilots’ union of American Airlines – the company, not the country – from striking at midnight on Friday. To be truthful, the strike was called and it was obeyed. It lasted for 24 minutes before everyone was recalled to work.

"Everyone" is 75,000 employees, 9,000 pilots, hundreds of planes. It was a very expensive 24 minutes. The company lost about $200million in advance bookings, $100millions as the cost of stopping and starting service round the world. The market capital of the company fell $1billion, just about the amount American Airlines earned all through last year.

There was a time, I’d say only 30 years ago, there was a time when an airline strike – even in this country, which has for long had more daily flights than all the countries of Europe put together – when a strike was a nuisance to the flying public and the businesses that used air freight, cargo. But it did not deal a vital blow to the economy. It wasn’t a coal strike, a steel strike, a railway strike.

With three such strikes, three presidents seized the mines, the steel mills, the railways; either forced them to keep going through rarely-used laws or through an emergency act of Congress; or, when Harry Truman faced two obstinate railroad unions, he threatened to call in the army to run the trains and went before Congress to have the enabling law enacted. The two holdouts caved in.

A month or more ago, when the strike was threatened, President Clinton was very firm in saying that a settlement was entirely up to the company and the pilots’ union. For good political reasons, the president did not want to offend one of his most reliable constituencies, namely organised labour.

Admittedly the unions all across the country have been languishing for the past 30 years or so as a political force; only 18 Americans in 100 belong to a union. But there’s a new mood, a new tune in the air. The new president of the biggest national industrial union, deciding to rouse the sleeping lion, has said the only way to reassert the power that labour had in the 1930s and '40s was to strike, strike, strike.

What made Mr Clinton change his mind in the fading last hour of Friday was the realisation, which to most of us has been slow to come, that the airline industry and the truckers, the Teamsters’ union, together have made all but suburban railroads an anachronism in this country, an artefact of a dead civilisation.

I just checked with my daughter, 48 years old. She has never been in a train in this country.

The railroad passenger was a vanishing type 25 years ago when a public corporation funded by Congress (and never doing very well) took over the passenger train companies and the trains, which are almost all commuter or short-run trains. The famous cross-continental trains, which were a joy to live in for three or four days and nights, are all gone.

I once went to work to study the railroad grid of the United States and concluded that by about 1906 there was nowhere in this country, this continent, no tiny town you couldn’t reach by railroad. Then hundreds of them had been created, however humble, by putting up a water tower, so the trains could stop there.

Well some time in the early 1960s, I think, I was doing some boning up on Western history and I thought there could be an attractive series of pieces for my paper in a tour of famous or infamous small towns: Virginia City, Nevada, site of the Comstock Lode of a hundred saloons, one church, much rowdiness, Mark Twain’s first stamping ground. Catherine, Kansas, named after Catherine the Great where Russian immigrants were the first to plant turkey red wheat. And the immortal Deadwood, South Dakota, where the miserable Jack McCall slunk into the No Ten Saloon and shot in the back the Marshal (Wild Bill Hickok) as he was holding a hand of aces and eights – ever afterwards to be known as the dead man’s hand.

I got busy with maps and timetables and atlases and discovered in no time you couldn’t get to any of these places anymore by train directly. You could take a train to Chicago, change, then a train to perhaps Sioux Falls, then take a bus, then another. Goodbye. I abandoned the whole idea.

So passenger trains were no longer what most people used for travel. Somebody as late (I seem to remember) as the 1920s said, “The root and branch of America’s prosperity is the railroad freight train.” And so indeed it was.

You know that most of the state capitals of America were located in what today seem odd places. They were always at the head of a river – Albany, New York, Sacramento, California – but the railroads supplanted the steam boat as the suppliers of crops and manufactures and merchandise to the cities.

Today the barometer of the health of the economy is the CPI, the Consumer Price Index. Yesterday it was the GNP, the Gross National Product. But 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, it was freight car loadings.

I remember a cartoon in New Yorker. It must have been in the 1930s. It was a favourite theme in those days: the ageing businessman, known universally as a Sugar Daddy, and his Tootsie; in the New Yorker version, always a wide-eyed, rather amazed innocent.

This moustachioed, prosperous figure was leaning over almost into the lady’s bosom and confiding, “If freight car loadings keep on the way they’re going, forget Florida. We’re off to Europe.”

What displaced the railroads just before the second war? Well Yale University appointed a new chair, a head of the Department of Traffic Engineering and Traffic Architecture. We Europeans thought that very funny and very American. However, this man designed and saw built the first divided highways, motorways which were called parkways for two reasons: the dividing strip varied in width and was planted with trees and little lakes; and these motorways were for private cars only, no commercial traffic.

To this day on Long Island, there are three such parkways and very pleasant too, but not many other places. Everywhere else has succumbed to the expressway for all traffic – four-lane each way, six, eight all across the country.

And the first people to take advantage of this vast post-war spread of motorways were the Teamsters, the national truckers’ union, who have in the interval taken over most of the railroads’ cargo or freight.

By now the regular sounds you hear that punctuate the long, dark hours of the night are not the rumble of the long-distance freight trains and the different whistles of the many, many branch or spur lines that were the songs of a once-dense continental web of railroads. What you hear are the thunder of huge trucks on the freeways and expressways delivering everything to everybody everywhere.

It has occurred to most of us, I’m sure, only now that the two institutions that could paralyse and bankrupt the country together more than any others are the Teamsters and the airline pilots. While airlines now share a good deal of heavy cargo, just think of the vast quantities of material, tanks, heavy artillery that were delivered overnight to Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War.

The grip of the pilots on the economy is their hold on the passenger. And the American pilots’ threat reminded us in many a vivid television picture and spoken lament that while in some countries, perhaps in most, we rightly think of the airline passenger as a rather comfortably off tourist, in America one person in three out of 260 million flies, and at least half of them fly all the time on business by way of earning their daily bread.

So what frightens most about the barely-interrupted airline strike was not the thought of the hardship imposed on restaurants and lunch counters and airline shops and food companies and small hotels and beach resorts and all the little people who in the Bahamas and the Caribbean Islands were talking about going bust with the collapsing tourist season. It’s the day’s business slumping in a hundred ways throughout the United States and on into Central and South America and Europe.

The midnight of Friday 14th was a moment of painful recognition that, as I hinted at the beginning, society from time to time turns away from a familiar institution and dependable bulwark and never goes back.

The actual money and employment issues of the strike don’t matter to us just now. What matters now is the process of the law, the 1934 Railway Labour Act, which the president invoked. He has sent in three mediators who have 30 days to propose a fair settlement and the contending parties then have another 30 days to ponder and accept it.

If the pilots reject it, then the strike begins again with a measure of damage to the American and European and perhaps Pacific economy we can now hardly guess.

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