"Wages are clearly a factor in the troubles that the steel and auto industries had, but wages were not necessarily the defining factor," Shaiken said. "It's easy to make wages the culprit, but wages did not give you problems like the Ford Pinto. Wages did not give you the failure of the steel industry to modernize. But high wages may have worsened other problems."
The airline unions, like the steel workers and auto workers, are far weaker than in their heyday. But like the others, the airline unions hope to avoid the scrapheap by cooperating with employers, perhaps by granting concessions, to keep them competitive. At American and United, the pilots, machinists and flight attendants approved billions of dollars in labor savings because they were eager to rescue their companies and their jobs.
"In times of trouble, American industry comes to unions to seek their help and almost always when the need is real, the unions give it," said Julius Getman, a labor law professor at the University of Texas. "This has happened in industry after industry. Of course as industries get weaker, the unions in those industries get weaker, too."
Some industry experts say the airlines can learn from the steel and auto industries. Labor relations in those industries were often rancorous, but when import competition caused a wave of plant closings and layoffs in the 1980s, unions joined with steel and automakers, as never before, to work together to increase productivity and quality.
"Those industries went from having a very adversarial labor-management relationships to being much more cooperative," said Paul F. Clark, a professor of labor studies at Pennsylvania State University.
He asserted that increased labor-management cooperation would be vital for saving several airlines from oblivion. But he said the executive bonuses and special pensions that American Airlines promised its top executives had badly undercut labor's willingness to cooperate with management.
"It was a critical point in labor relations, and what American Airlines did was probably the worst thing they can do at the worst time," he said. "If the airlines can move to a more cooperative relationship with labor, that can play a big role in pulling them out of this tailspin."
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