Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn., August 19, 2005, Friday

Copyright 2005 Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Copyright 2005 Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.
Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

August 19, 2005, Friday

HEADLINE: Tenacious leader at helm of mechanics union's showdown with Northwest

BYLINE: By Jennifer Bjorhus

BODY:

To supporters, he's a far-sighted labor leader, tenacious and giving.
To detractors, he's an elitist and a huckster, obsessed with a dream.
In turn hated and revered, O.V. Delle-Femine is the man guiding the maverick Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association in the final hours of its bitter showdown with Eagan-based Northwest Airlines. Delle-Femine (dell-FEM-i-nee) co-founded the union more than 40 years ago, and has shepherded the union's growth to 15,000 workers at eight airlines.
At 72, this short, bespectacled bullet of a man has lived and breathed AMFA's hard-line philosophy for decades.
Now Delle-Femine is leading 4,400 Northwest workers into a strike that some say could put them out of work for good, and others see as the last stand for a craft under siege.
AMFA is Delle-Femine's life's work. Tonight's showdown is as much his as his union's.
Speaking by phone Thursday evening from Washington, D.C., where AMFA and Northwest negotiators have been hunkered down in the National Mediation Board building, a frustrated Delle-Femine called the negotiations "a ruse."
"What they really want to do is file for bankruptcy to terminate the pension plans of the employees. Now they're going to blame our mechanics and say they caused it," Delle-Femine said. "They just want to destroy the union."
Delle-Femine's job is one few would want right now.
AMFA is all but isolated from other unions whose support it could sorely use. That's largely because AMFA was built by raiding members from other unions -- the No. 1 sin in labor land, said John Budd, a labor-relations expert at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. AMFA remains outside the powerful AFL-CIO union umbrella. Its leaders insist they go nowhere they aren't invited.
The union is working in the worst of industry environments, battling a seemingly inexorable trend toward outsourcing airplane maintenance to third parties. For the first time in its history, AMFA gave in to concessions, signing a contract in May with bankrupt United Airlines to give it $ 96 million in pay cuts and other givebacks. The union had a gun to its head, Delle-Femine explained, and risked much worse before a bankruptcy judge.
AMFA is now cornered into negotiating not for raises or better benefits, but to keep nearly half its Northwest work force from being fired. In the last proposal made public, the money-losing airline wanted its mechanics to take $ 176 million in annual wage and benefit cuts, including a 25 percent pay cut and the layoff of 2,000 more mechanics -- just under half AMFA's remaining work force at Northwest. The union's last public offer was $ 143 million in annual wage and benefit cuts, including a 16 percent pay cut for one year with part of the overall savings coming from credit for some of the 5,000 mechanics and cleaners Northwest has already laid off. New proposals are being traded.
If AMFA strikes or there's a lockout, there is pain. If AMFA cuts a last-minute deal there will be pain. Damned either way, say labor analysts.
"This is probably as bad as it gets for a union leader," said Gary Chaison, an industrial relations expert at Clark University in Massachusetts. "He's in a fight with no allies."
"Dell," as everyone calls him, is no stranger to bad fights. When AMFA's history is written, its title could be Going It Alone.
In 1962, Delle-Femine was a mechanic for American Airlines at New York's La Guardia airport when he and two friends got frustrated with the Transport Workers Union and broke away to start their own. In a throwback to the craft unions of the 19th century, they formed a union just for mechanics -- an unusual move at a time when the U.S. labor model was big centralized unions.
AMFA landed its first victory in 1964 at Ozark Airlines, and others followed. But for most of its life AMFA has been a fringe union, with Delle-Femine living out of his suitcase, sleeping in airports as he crisscrossed the country wooing prospects.
In fact, from 1986 to 1991 AMFA had no active members at all. Delle-Femine said he supported himself partly by buying some houses and converting them to rentals. Friends say that at one point they had to pass the hat to pay for his health insurance. Delle-Femine stuck as AMFA's elected national leader mostly because he ran unopposed, friends said. They doubted anyone wanted the job.
"There have been times I think when Dell may have been the only guy out there that really still believed it could happen," said Steve MacFarlane, AMFA's assistant national director who has known Delle-Femine for 25 years.
A voracious reader who loves opera and good cigars and always wears suits to meetings, Delle-Femine organized soup kitchens, helped start a hospice, and requires just five hours of sleep a night. Talking to him means catching him between flights where he always totes a book -- most recently The Secret Life of Lobsters.
Don't ask what O.V. stands for. He hates the long Italian names and won't tell anyone, just as he eschews talking about his personal life. He grew up in an Italian family in East Providence, R.I., where his father was superintendent of parks and playgrounds. His first marriage fell apart. His second wife, Marie, was the love of his life and stood by him through the worst, friends said.
It wasn't until 1998, shortly after Marie died of cancer, that Delle-Femine hit the big leagues. AMFA finally seduced members away from the powerful International Association of Machinists at Northwest Airlines with expectations of industry-leading contracts and big raises. Overnight, AMFA went from 1,000 members to 11,000.
It had taken 10 years to win Northwest. Four times AMFA lost. Delle-Femine would not give up.
Friends say he personifies tenacity. "There are very few people in life that have a dream and against all odds just keep fighting. I don't know how the man does it. Somebody should do a movie about this guy," said Victor Remeneski, a retired Northwest mechanic in Atlanta and charter AMFA member.
MacFarlane recalled feeling utterly defeated after AMFA lost Northwest the last time. Delle-Femine, he said, was unshakeable.
"Dell would always say 'Don't worry, we'll get back in, we'll get 'em next time,' " MacFarlane said. "He always kept the flame alive."
AMFA rode its Northwest win to other major airlines, capturing ATA, Horizon, Southwest and United. Most dues stay with the local offices, but there's enough now to pay Delle-Femine $ 139,500 a year, according to members. AMFA has come a long way since it was bankrolled by Marie Delle-Femine's job at a travel agency.
"Dell's biggest sorrow is that she wasn't around to see what happened, that all the sacrifices were worthwhile," Remeneski said.
Labor experts disagree over whether AMFA represents the future face of U.S. unions or one of their biggest threats.
Homegrown, occupation-based groups such as AMFA are more in touch with members and where they work, said Clark University's Chaison. Others scoff, saying independent unions can't effectively deal with powerful multinational corporations.
AMFA lacks the strike resources and experience, and the crucial network of support from other organizations to take on powerful company, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University. Whatever happens next will be a referendum on AMFA's legitimacy. Failure to extract a good deal for its mechanics will be a serious setback.
AMFA's structure has long drawn critics. Other unions are headquartered in Washington, D.C., but AMFA is based in Laconia, N.H., a town of some 16,000 north of Boston. Even more unusual, it has outsourced its administration to a management company called McCormick Advisory Group, which also runs other independent unions. It's more cost-effective than maintaining a big union staff, said Delle-Femine, one of nine full-time AMFA staff in Laconia.
Experts question whether AMFA's famed independence, the source of its strength, will now hurt it. To be sure, many of the AMFA's 4,400 members at Northwest support Delle-Femine and AMFA's hard-line position with the airline.
"We're behind him all the way," said Dave Blair, a Woodbury electrician who's been with Northwest for 25 years. "I would say 90-95 percent of the guys are behind him."
But not all. And with only hours to go before the final deadline, none of Northwest's other key unions have pledged to honor an AMFA picket line.
Delle-Femine's formal appeal for support in a July 27 letter to the International Association of Machinists elicited a frosty reply. The IAM represents about 14,500 Northwest baggage handlers and other ground workers. It won't make a decision whether to support AMFA until a strike actually starts, said local IAM leader Bobby De Pace.
It's not looking good. Deep wounds remain from AMFA's break with the IAM. AMFA leaders, De Pace said, allowed its members to call IAM members "bag smashers, knuckle-draggers." IAM members view Delle-Femine as "elitist, self-centered and selfish," De Pace said.
Some AMFA members use similar language, although AMFA leaders dismiss them as the die-hard IAMers still hostile over the breakup. AMFA member Jerry Sowells, for one, faults Delle-Femine for being too soft on farming out work to third parties, and not delivering on pledges of no concessions.
"He's truly a snake oil salesman, he's a huckster and a clown," said Sowells, a Northwest mechanic in Eagan who's been with the company 24 years. "We're going to be out on the street not knowing what we're out for."
It is telling that IAM members are cooperating as Northwest trains some to take over non-technical AMFA tasks in the event of the strike. Northwest confirmed that it's training IAMers to push airplanes away from the gates and to clean cabins on turnaround flights -- work that is AMFA turf in the Twin Cities. IAM instructed its members to "do it and grieve it" if they object, De Pace said.
Delle-Femine called IAM's cooperation with Northwest "discouraging and stupid" and accused the two of trying to sabotage his union. Whatever happens, it won't kill the seed he's planted, Delle-Femine said -- that the mechanics should have their own union.
"That legacy will stay forever," he said.
"We know what they're doing. They're out to bust us," he said. "This is a fight for the whole airline industry. This is it. This is the big fight."
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