The Assault on Labor

The 1986 TWA Strike and the Decline of Workers Rights in America

By (author) Sandra L. Albrecht

Publication date:

20 December 2016

Length of book:

246 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498537704

The Assault on Labor details the 1986 Independent Federation of Flight Attendants (IFFA) strike against Trans World Airlines (TWA), one of the most dramatic instances of the heightened labor conflict in the 1980s. Using extensive court, union, and company documents, The Assault on Labor shows how the expanded use of permanent replacements in labor disputes has fundamentally altered workers’ legal right to strike. Set within one of the biggest corporate raids of the time, it was a strike of a predominantly female labor force that garnered respect throughout the labor movement for its solidarity and determination. Faced with the permanent replacement of over 5000 strikers, IFFA waged a three year struggle to return all workers to the line, mobilizing political, economic, and legal actions to secure their jobs and survive as a union. Despite critical successes in the courts in the aftermath of the strike, the Supreme Court would render a decision that further strengthened permanent replacements. Since the 1980s, labor’s major form of protest, the right to strike, has all but disappeared.
The erosion of the size, visibility, and power of the labor movement is one of the central developments in late-20th-century US history. From a high of one-third of workers in the 1950s, union density dropped to just over 10 percent by the early 21st century. Scholars have often explained this dramatic decline by citing some combination of global economic forces, employer resistance, and the weakness of US labor law. Rarely has one book brought all of those elements together. Sociologist Albrecht (Univ. of Kansas) charts the growing employer resistance to organized labor through a study of the origins, conduct, and consequences of the 1986 strike by 6,000 flight attendants against Trans World Airlines (TWA). Eschewing simple critiques of stolid, bureaucratic union leadership or unabashed corporate greed, Albrecht shows how a combination of industry deregulation, financial and corporate restructuring, and gendered conceptions of work helped provoke a stoppage. Left vulnerable by a legal regime that allowed TWA to hire replacement workers, the ten-week strike collapsed in failure. It took nearly five years for the strikers to resume their old jobs under a new concessionary arrangement—a stinging but telling indictment of workers’ diminished power in the late-20th-century US. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students/faculty.