Delta's EVP of HR, from Anti-Pilot Union-Busting Law Firm Ford & Harrison

[Voice Of Reason]

Congrats Delta, you've been UNION-BUSTED! WARNED YOU!

re: Delta's EVP of HR, Mike H. Campbell, from Anti-Pilot Union-Busting Law Firm Ford & Harrison
Just linked to this from an aviation news site, and noticed this...I am sure you DL & NWA guys are already well aware of what this company does... here's to hoping that a non-negotiable part of any agreement includes his resignation. Here at Flight Options they have helped our company's (mis) management drag the profession of our pilots from a great job, into a complete nightmare in a very short period of time. They are likely paid more to do so, than it would cost in acceptable pilot wages. "Human" Resources they are not, and operating under multiple screen names on the fractional boards FYI.
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http://www.ajc.com/news/content/business/delta/stories/2008/02/19/dalbios_0220.html

Company leaders: Who will decide
...
Mike H. Campbell, 59, executive vice president human resources, labor and communications, joined Delta in 2006 from Atlanta-based law firm Ford & Harrison, where he was a founding partner. Oversaw human resources and labor relations for Continental in the 1990s.

...
NORTHWEST EXECUTIVES
Douglas Steenland, 56, CEO since October 2004 and Northwest's president since April 2001. Led the airline through bankruptcy. In 2006, he was among airline executives who successfully lobbied Congress to change pension law to help them avoid defaulting pension plans. Joined Northwest in 1991 as deputy general counsel. Worked under Anderson when he was Northwest CEO. Also served in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Transportation (ed: A/K/A "Anti-Trust Lawyer). His potential payout if a merger knocks him out of the top post: $7.8 million in cash and benefits (plus $4.12 million in current value pension benefits).
...
— Compiled by Nisa Asokan and Scott Thurston

Sources: company Web sites, SEC documents, Who's Who in America, Standard & Poor's

When gas gets even higher this summer, and people radically cut their travel, and the DL pilots continue to be taken in by every trick from the "CONFESSIONS OF A UNION BUSTER" handbook, and when by January (the month that your alleged new union busting contract starts) the new (even worse) economy will deem it null & void...that'll be okay, because even though you'll see none of it, you consorted with greedy CEOs (who will be long gone soon) to ensure that the mass furloughs will occur via the NWA guys you did INDEED "throw under the bus."
Your pilot group will be looked on accordingly in the industry an ALL that comes with that rep, I assure you.
Ford & Harrison has made a decades old career of outwitting the naive in the pilot ranks, and you fell for it in such a textbook way. Sad.
As for ALPA NATIONAL: You should be ashamed of all that you have allowed to occur, and I'm betting the USAPA is just the beginning of your troubles if you don't IMMEDIATELY deny the actions of the DL MEC. This industry has been infected by ills that ALPA, with all their resources and access to lobbyists has ignored! THAT is why your end is near unless you ACT NOW!
I have all the respect in the world for the NWA guys who have seen this happen again and again, and KNOW what is coming. SUUUURE you're getting a raise and "equity stake" (nevermind the market dumps on this deal, or the RECESSION, or the GAS prices still skyrocketing, and people who won't be buying (the newly raised in a recession) tickets.
Hello????? NWA guys are willing to stand their ground to protect SENIORITY that we all hold dear as pilots in EVERY part of the industry!
NOW do you get why seniority is all that matters???
Oh yeah, no...you don't...because you are STEALING from a perfectly stand alone carrier's account and stealing (in the name of "merger") a pilot group that you only want to pad the bottom when they DO INDEED furlough.
Thanks, Delta MEC for helping to aid in the ills of this industry, and greatly limiting all pilot's options to join the majors for a LEGITIMATE career with legitimate seniority.
Argh...vent done...thought my company was the worst, but this takes the cake. No wonder people are leaving the industry in droves...

 

[Voice Of Reason]

Book Review

"
Confession of a union buster

Search WWW Search pww.org
Author: Tony Pecinovsky
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 10/16/03 14:37

Book review

Confessions of a Union Buster, by Martin Jay Levitt, Crown Publishers Inc., 302 pp., hardcover, $25.

Martin Jay Levitt joined the union-busting business in 1969. He was 25 years old, divorced, living with his parents, and in need of fast cash. The seduction was too much. Besides, like his first union-busting boss told him, “We do the Lord’s work.”

Even though Levitt wasn’t sure what was meant by the “Lord’s work,” he learned quickly and found out early on that the Lord’s servants were paid handsomely. After all, union busters weren’t “anti-union.” They were “pro-company and pro-employee.” So at age 25 Levitt began making $500 dollars a day and billed the client company for “every single expenditure ... for the duration” of a union-busting campaign.

Levitt’s first union-busting campaigns introduced him to the most “common strateg[ies] among management lawyers.” First, Levitt tells us, “Challenge everything ... then take every challenge to a full hearing ... then prolong each hearing” as long as possible, then “appeal every unfavorable decision.”

According to Levitt there was method to the madness. “If you [can] make the union fight drag on long enough, workers...lose faith, lose interest, lose hope.” Taking away people’s hopes, their aspirations for a better future – that was Levitt’s job.

While Levitt understood the strategies of union busting, his understanding of why union busting is such a lucrative profession jelled later on. As Levitt chatted one night with a dinner guest, John Rogers, the “top industrial relations man at Cleveland Trust Bank,” he found out what the union-busting business was all about. “Control,” Rogers told him.

“After that night,” Levitt writes, “I began to see that the business was all about control. I realized that control was both the objective and the method in union busting.” According to Levitt, corporations want to learn the “secrets of staying in control ... during an organizing drive.”

Confessions really hits home when Levitt gives the details of how a union-busting campaign is waged. In the late seventies, Levitt worked for a firm called Modern Management Methods (Three M). Three M was hired to consult management at Harper Grace hospital, where (what has since become) the Service Employees International Union 1199 was in the middle of a organizing drive.

According to Robert Muehlenkamp, an 1199 organizer, “Union busters wield great power through their program of terror and manipulation – people don’t, can’t possible know what’s going on and who’s telling the truth. You have to appreciate that most of the people [at a work site] are just ordinary people. They have no experience … with violence, with being lied to, with manipulation, with being harassed in open, gross, insulting ways. The first time this happens to regular people, they’re terrified.” And terror is the goal. The union buster hopes to control employees by employing terror.

But it isn’t just about breaking an organizing drive at one single location. Levitt quotes Muehlenkamp again to emphasize the point: “If they [hospital workers] watched all the workers at the only other hospital ... try to organize and saw what happened to them, only to lose, they weren’t going to attempt the same.”

One of the most striking things about Confessions is its brutal honesty, its brutal portrayal of the union buster and his awareness of the conditions of the would-be union members he was paid to manipulate, confuse and eventually defeat.

Throughout Confessions we are also introduced to Levitt’s wife and children. We are told of Levitt’s on-again, off-again, romances and affairs, the thirst for more and more material wealth – luxury cars and huge houses – and the unquenchable drinking. Levitt repeatedly tells us that drinking became the only way he could accept the reality of what he did.

In the mid-eighties he decided to seek alcoholic treatment and change his profession. He called the AFL-CIO and told the leadership of his decision. While skeptical at first, the AFL-CIO realized that insider knowledge of the union-busting business was valuable and that Martin Jay Levitt wanted to try to make amends.

At the beginning of Confessions, Levitt tells of a speech he gave at the 1988 Western Conference of the Brotherhood of Carpenters. At the end of the speech many in the audience had tears in their eyes, Levitt writes. He then adds, “It was not joy, but an overwhelming feeling of relief that filled the men who heard me that day: relief to know that the war they had suspected was being waged on them had been a real one all along and not just a creation of a unions paranoid imagination, as so many corporate bosses had told them.”

The war Levitt speaks of has intensified since Bush took office. Confessions should be read widely."

 

[njcapt]

The war Levitt speaks of has intensified since Bush took office. Confessions should be read widely."

One of the best books I ever read. Allows you to see right through management negotiating tactics, especially the ones orchestrated by ford and harrison, who have done not one original thing in 25 years.

Well worth the purchase. Buy Hard Landing at the same time.

 

[AA717driver]

For Immediate Distribution

Press Release:

General Lee, Delta Crew Room, JFK--I would like to put all rumors to rest that the presence of Mike Campbell, founding partner at Ford & Harrison in the HR department at Delta Airlines (the LARGEST AIRLINE IN THE WORLD) portends ANY sort of effort by Delta (the LARGEST AIRLINE IN THE WORLD) to water down the compensation and benefits of my fellow employees (except for those coming from Northwest Airlines, a rather minor player for the past couple of decades in the airline business).

I believe Delta Airlines (the LARGEST AIRLINE IN THE WORLD) has the employee's best interests at heart and will prove that to be the case once the cretins from Northwest are firmly put in their place and punished for not accepting the overly generous offer from the extremely magnanimous Capt. Lee Moak and the Delta (the LARGEST AIRLINE IN THE WORLD) MEC.

I look forward to flying you in the future (in the 744 we got from those Winged Monkeys from the North...).

Sincerely,

General Lee

 

[XJohXJ]

Of course, with Delta being a primarily un-unionized airline, who's employees outnumber NWA's in every segment of the organization, it would be simply paranoid to see this whole merger as one big union-busting effort against NWA's employees.

 

[Axel]

He is worthless SOB. Made millions off the employees at CAL.

Worthless to whom?

 

[aircowboy]

I hope everyone is paying attention to this.

 

[Voice Of Reason]

I hope everyone is paying attention to this.

Hopefully they are NOW...
The DL MEC i being played like a fiddle.
This is not a random comment... these Ford & Harrison people are brought on for a SPECIFIC PURPOSE under the guise of "human resources," long before a merger (or other planned exec chaos event) is a blip on the general population's radar. This has happened at Flight Options, Continental, and many MANY other airlines and flying organizations...yet many people STILL fail to acknowledge the Ford & Harrison (aka F&H Solutions, etc etc) presence and all that means. There is ONLY one reason to bring on board someone from Ford & Harrison, and that is to do the ONLY thing they have specialized in....busting pilot union organization, and also when they are organized dividing & conquering to create mass disunity to achieve their goals.
They SPECIALIZE in working "invisibly" behind the scenes, coaching mgt & execs in the art of promising the world (raises that never materialize regardless of being "in writing," etc) KNOWING that they are creating a situation where that CAN NOT or WILL NOT occur.
The next step in the textbook is to blame pilots (in this case 1 specific group of them) for being the reason that the imaginary "riches" will not be coming.
The difference here, as opposed to historical pilot behavior, is that you actually have one group in the same national union that is actually an ACCOMPLICE to the union busting.
ALPA National seems to be embarrassingly silent regarding this practice.

 

[AA717driver]

these Ford & Harrison people are brought on for a SPECIFIC PURPOSE under the guise of "human resources,"

And, the Delta MEC is only too willing to throw the NWA group under the bus because they had the audacity to turn down their proposal and oppose the merger.

I'm sure the union-busters are wetting their panties with delight. TC

 

[JoeMerchant]

Union busting assumes you have a union....we don't...there is no union busting going on.....

ALPA busts itself up on a regular basis....this is just yet another example....