A little more from FTL If the Continental strikers had been able to hold those first critical 300 pilots on their side of the picket line in October, Lorenzo almost certainly would have capitulated. For three nervous weeks, Lorenzo trembled on the edge of defeat. He didn’t have enough management pilots to fly his projected schedule for more than a few days, and the sheer logistics of requalification meant that he couldn’t get enough of the 400 Continental furloughees or “off-the-street” new-hires into his cockpits in time to save the situation. In any case, Lorenzo didn’t advertise for “permanent replacement” new-hires until November.
But as October progressed, he was getting enough picket-line crossers to hope that he might not have to hire any pilots “off the street.”
“In the first two weeks, vast numbers were crossing the picket line,” says Dennis Higgins. “There was a lot of concern as to whether we could get that hemorrhaging under control.”
As things steadied, and when it looked like ALPA’s lines were going to hold at the first batch of crossovers, Lorenzo would find pilots elsewhere. But he would have lost without those October “in-house” scabs, particularly a group of 110 who crossed during the third weekend of the strike when the MEC seemed to be in turmoil owing to the recall of Larry Baxter (which we will discuss shortly). As Lorenzo’s skeleton pilot force nearly ran up against the maximum FAA-imposed flight time limits and a shutdown loomed during the closing days of the month, he grew desperate. Proof of Lorenzo’s desperation lay in his quite uncharacteristic willingness to resume serious negotiations in late October.
“In the early stages, Lorenzo wasn’t sure he was going to pull it off in terms of adequate numbers of pilots,” believes Kirby Schnell, whose 553 combat missions as a Marine pilot in Vietnam engendered a toughness that would sustain him as the Continental pilots’ Negotiating Committee chairman throughout the strike. “Once we stabilized our lines, the negotiations were probably as close to real as anything we ever had. But when large numbers of our own pilots started back to work [during the third week], from then on, Lorenzo’s negotiating was nothing more than maintaining a posture for public consumption.”
Once Lorenzo had survived that first month and he realized that he would have a breathing space in which to hire “permanent replacements,” to tap into the reservoir of unemployed pilots who would unhesitatingly cross ALPA’s pickets, negotiations became a sham. By November, the second month of the strike, only hard, remorseless struggle remained.
Although the conventional wisdom holds that after the first month the decks were stacked against the Continental pilots, they were not without weapons, and they made a good fight of it. The courts provided a promising avenue of attack. Because of Lorenzo’s use of the bankruptcy laws, ALPA had standing as a litigant. Continental’s pilots were creditors under the bankruptcy rules because Lorenzo owed them money for unpaid salaries and unfunded pensions. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that he would lose—that a judge would disallow cancellation of union contracts under the bankruptcy code. Eventually, as we shall see, these court actions would not turn out well for ALPA, but they did provide the fulcrum from which ALPA would exert leverage to force Lorenzo into court-ordered negotiations that would bring about the “Order and Award” settlement of 1985. But for many months to come, nobody could be sure of the outcome of these legal actions, so the war had to continue as if they didn’t exist.
In another Korean War analogy, despite the fact that peace talks began at Panmunjom in July 1951, U.N. forces had to continue fighting for two more years, because nobody could be sure that the maddeningly slow negotiations would ever produce anything. The role of embittered, unemployed ex-Braniff pilots in this drama was as critical as the intervention of Chinese “volunteers” on the side of the defeated North Koreans.
“The big difference at Continental was that 4,000 surplus pilots were out there,” Hank Duffy said sadly in his 1990 interview. “The Braniff pilots were pushing each other out of the way to get in.”
Here again, a statesmanlike gesture on the part of Hank Duffy quite unintentionally aggravated the situation. When Braniff emerged from bankruptcy in March 1984, it did so under a new ALPA contract with pay and working conditions many striking Continental pilots thought equivalent to Lorenzo’s. News of this new Braniff contract came almost simultaneously with the Bildisco Decision, angering many weary Continental pilots, who were wavering as their strike settled into its sixth month.
“My first involvement with Braniff was signing that contract,” Hank Duffy explained later. “I debated it and decided I would bring that inferior contract in with an ALPA imprimatur. We held out for all the boilerplate, seniority, and grievance, but anything that cost money we just weren’t going to get.”
Duffy’s contractual lenience toward Braniff’s new owner, Jay Pritzker of Hyatt Hotel fame, struck many Continental strikers as oddly out of sync with ALPA’s policy toward Lorenzo. Of course the great difference between the new Braniff contract and the conditions Lorenzo offered was that the Pritzkers negotiated with ALPA, whereas Lorenzo imposed his terms unilaterally. Duffy hoped that once Braniff was on its feet financially, the “B-scale” contract he signed could be upgraded. As it turned out, he was right, although in 1989, immediately after agreeing to the “industry standard” contract that the first agreement was calculated to procure, “Braniff II” would succumb to “Bankruptcy II.”
So it all came to nothing, but that lay in the future. For the moment, the Continental pilot’s view from the trenches lacked this foresight, and the substandard Braniff contract produced considerable grumbling on the picket line and an increased willingness to cross.
The peculiar nature of the strike’s inception added another handicap. Repeatedly, Lorenzo would ask pilots he telephoned how they had voted on the strike. Lorenzo knew full well that there had been no formal strike ballot, merely a show of hands in crowded mass meetings at the various domiciles, under the kind of confused, “fog of war” conditions any combat veteran would remember.
“There never was a formal mail ballot,” Guy Casey agrees, “but there were voice and hand votes at all the local council meetings, and they were all decidedly in favor of striking.”