A funeral march

Nick Coleman's Sunday column about the mood of the striking mechanics captured my feelings well.

This isn't a labor strike. Labor strikes have winners and losers. This is a funeral march. At the end of a funeral march, there are no winners or losers.

There is just sadness.

Maybe that's why the striking Northwest Airlines mechanics look more grief-stricken than angry: They walked away from jobs they were losing anyway. It's like a man abandoning his burning home by saying, "I think I'll take a walk and get some fresh air."

Better to die standing on a picket line than on your knees.

"If we didn't strike, my job would be gone anyway," said Ken Dodge, 57, of Eden Prairie, who, despite 27 years at the airline, figures his job would be among the many Northwest wants to eliminate. "I find it all hard to believe."

Thankfully for the mechanics, they are skilled workers. Many of them have already been looking for new jobs and shoring up their finances:

Mark Herboldt, 39, a lead mechanic at Northwest, is among those who plan to find other work during the strike. In June, he got his general contractor's license. His plan is to spend mornings walking the picket line and afternoons renovating houses.

Herboldt also has in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of hydraulic motors -- a skill he has used in the past to make some extra money repairing large vehicles and construction equipment.

"It's important to remember that there are some talented people out here with a broad range of experiences," said Herboldt, who spoke Saturday while carrying a sign outside the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. "Just because we're on strike doesn't mean we'll be out of work."

They will probably be worse off than as unionized mechanics at Northwest Airlines, and many of them will probably leave the area, a sad loss for Minnesota. But they will survive.

Anyone who believes Northwest isn't out to break the union is kidding themselves. Zack Stephenson at MN Publius notes that NWA spent $100M on training replacement workers (via MPR). $100M would've bought a lot of compromise.

No, it will go something like this.

1. ) Northwest will last out the strike with replacement workers and scabs, already making less than they did as union mechanics.

2.) The union will give up. Most of its members will already have taken another job.

3.) Northwest will announce it is moving nearly all maintenance operations to Malaysia.

4.) Northwest will then lay off most of the replacement workers.

Update: Regarding the mood of the mechanics, check out the NWA forum at US Aviation. I think this post succinctly caputures why the mechanics are striking:

In this situation, however, the mechanics are being asked to vote themselves out of a job because NW wants to outsource a much larger portion of maintenance work. It would be quite difficult for me to vote away my job so that I can go to work fixing VW's while someone in Malaysia does the D checks on 747-400s that I used to do.