The end of the CAL strike. I had read FTL as a new hire and had to find my dusty copy. I highly recommend another read. Then Lorenzo outsmarted himself—finally.
On Aug. 26, 1985, Lorenzo moved to terminate the ALPA contract. Declaring that Continental’s original acceptance of ALPA as the collective bargaining agent for its pilots was “voluntary” and had never been certified by a formal vote, Lorenzo announced that he was withdrawing the recognition. With 1,400 of his pilots having signed a petition requesting it, Lorenzo declared that a majority of all his pilots, even if the 1,000 strikers were included in the total, favored decertification of ALPA. He then unilaterally broke off the court-ordered negotiations, which had been sputtering on ineffectually.
At this point, cocky and overconfident, riding the crest of dozens of puff pieces in the business press describing him as “the wonderboy who took on the unions and won” and “the man who proved deregulation would work,” Lorenzo stubbed his toe. Notwithstanding that Bob Six had “voluntarily” accepted ALPA as the bargaining agent for Continental pilots back in 1942, Lorenzo could not unilaterally withdraw that recognition.
Established precedent in NLRB case law required a formal, supervised ballot—not the informal ballot Lorenzo announced. Having gotten away with canceling the wage and working conditions portion of the ALPA contract, Lorenzo figured the bankruptcy court would now permit total cancellation of the entire contract under the same rationale, and without going through the formal decertification process.
So without waiting for the bankruptcy court to rule on his high-handed action, Lorenzo announced an expansion of Continental’s flight schedule. Ironically, Lorenzo had been so successful at breaking the strike that he now needed more pilots. On Sept. 9, 1985, thinking ALPA’s legal challenge to his decertification would fail, Lorenzo announced a “vacancy bid” for nearly 500 captain and first officer positions, plus the hiring of an undetermined number of second officers “off the street.” Lorenzo believed his “decertification” of ALPA meant that striking pilots would have no standing to bid for these positions.
One final crisis now loomed for the Continental MEC. While ALPA tried to persuade the bankruptcy court of the illegality of Lorenzo’s decertification, the leaders of Continental’s pilot group would get one last grab for a very tarnished brass ring. Reluctantly, under severe prodding by ALPA’s outside legal counsel Bruce Simon, they agreed to submit bids for these new “vacant” pilot positions.
“It was two o’clock in the morning, and we were read the riot act by Bruce Simon, who told us it’s going downhill from here,” Vice-Chairman Pete Lappin recalls of the MEC meeting. “Most of us didn’t want to call off the strike for anything less than total victory. But we were losing people to suicide! Simon persuaded me that we had to swallow this piece of ****, save some jobs and some lives.”
Lorenzo promptly filed a petition with the court stating that the strikers were “not entitled to any of the bid vacancies under any circumstances,” because all of them had already been awarded to “permanent replacements.” The federal bankruptcy court thought otherwise.
On Oct. 31, 1985, Judge Roberts entered an “Order and Award” (O&A) of the bankruptcy court imposing a settlement on Lorenzo. Often denounced as the “Surrender Agreement” by militant Continental strikers, the O&A was, in fact, far better. Describing his O&A as a “global settlement,” Judge Roberts required that Lorenzo offer his pilots three options, ranging from reinstatement in order of seniority (according to a complicated formula) to severance pay of $4,000 for each year of service. Pilots who wished to retain their right to litigate further would also be reinstated, but only after all pilots who waived that right. Although not all former Continental captains moved immediately into the left seat, Lorenzo had to guarantee a substantial number of them captain’s pay anyway.
Within a year of the O&A, most Continental strikers were back in their cockpits—but not all. Guy Casey, Dennis Higgins, Dennis Duffy, Larry Baxter, Pete Lappin, to name but a few, did not appear on Continental’s seniority list. From the beginning, Lorenzo privately made it clear that he would never accept pilots who had played a leadership role in the strike.
Poststrike harassment is nothing new in ALPA’s history, but the subtlety of Lorenzo’s campaign set a new standard. His primary weapon was the polygraph machine, or “lie detector,” a device premised upon the unscientific notion that lying triggers certain physiological changes in fibbers. Lorenzo used these contraptions on Continental’s strike leaders in conjunction with legal depositions designed to ferret out knowledge of illegal acts committed during the strike. Although not admissible as evidence during a trial, the Texas bankruptcy court permitted Lorenzo to use them internally—a decision ALPA challenged unsuccessfully.
Armed with polygraph results, Lorenzo set out to make life difficult for Continental’s strike leaders during requalification.
“There were about a dozen individuals who were very active, vocal, and visible during the strike that the company didn’t want back under any circumstances,” says Kirby Schnell, who now works for the FAA. “Ed Nash [one of the few strike leaders who currently flies for Continental] is probably still looking over his shoulder, and that is nothing derogatory about Ed.”
“On days off, the company kept wanting Pete Lappin and me to submit to polygraph tests,” says Guy Casey, who finally found the harassment too much and went to work for United. “Then they said I had a heart problem, and I had to take a bunch of tests at my own expense—they showed I didn’t.”
One by one, all the principal strike leaders, when questioned about poststrike harassment, ask to “go off the tape.” They can’t prove what they say, and they know how litigious Lorenzo can still be. So they choose words carefully. But in every instance, they insist that they were privately warned by old friends in management (of which, surprisingly, there were more than a few) not to come back, that they would never make it through training. Save yourself the trouble, they were told, take “Option III,” the $4,000 per year severance pay, and run. Most did.
“Frank hates me, so I never considered going back,” says Dennis Higgins, whose consistent geniality masked the gut-fighter he had proven himself to be. Short and muscular, with a ready smile and disarming manner, Higgins built a nonflying career in labor relations after the strike.