Turning point for labor lurks in NWA tactic

08/28/2005

Terry Fiedler, Star Tribune
August 28, 2005

One week into a strike that could have crippled its operations, Northwest Airlines is flying without widespread disruptions largely for one reason, labor and industry analysts say: It took the extraordinary gamble of relying on an army of replacement workers the moment picketing began.

That hard-nosed decision, invoked on a scale not seen since the 1980s, could mark a historic turning point in relations between the nation’s beleaguered airline industry and its huge workforce.

“This is unusual in terms of preparation, visibility and the immediate use of the workers,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at University of California, Berkeley. “In all of those areas, it begins to break new ground.”

Terry Trippler, an airline industry analyst for CheapSeats.com, said he still has doubts the airline’s unusual strategy will succeed and stressed, “The fact that Northwest is still in the air is miraculous.”

It is a strategy 18 months in the making and not cheap. By some estimates, Northwest has spent $100 million training 1,200 replacement mechanics and other workers who walked on the job as soon as 4,400 members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association walked off late on Aug. 19 after months of fruitless contract negotiations.

After a rocky start, Northwest has been gradually improving its operating performance. According to the airline, the number of planes out of service for maintenance peaked at 57 on the first day of the strike, and as of Friday it was down to what the company called an acceptable level of 17.

Northwest completed 92 percent of its flights on the first day of the strike and by Friday it was up to 98 percent. Delays, which affected more than half of the total flights at the beginning of the strike, declined to 30 percent before spiking to nearly 50 percent Friday, although the airline said that was because of bad weather, not labor issues.

Union leaders dispute some of the airline’s figures. But industry analysts say that what is certainly clear is that Northwest, the nation’s fourth-largest carrier, is operating more or less on a regular schedule.

A nasty signal

What makes Northwest’s move so unusual?

Replacement workers often are not employed immediately after an impasse, and their training is not usually so well-financed and choreographed—or presented as such an obvious threat to union workers’ jobs.

“Using replacement workers is not new,” said Richard Hurd, professor of industrial relations at Cornell University. “But the use of them by a company with multiple unions and a long history of reasonable relations with other unions is unusual.

“It certainly sends a signal that they are willing to be nasty to long-term employees if they feel it benefits the company.”

That’s the point, Shaiken said. He said Northwest, which is saddled with the highest unit costs in the industry, did not spend so much money on replacement workers just to get the $176 million in annual concessions it demanded from the mechanics.

“What it represents is its investment in wrenching $1.1 billion in [annual] concessions from all unions,” Shaiken said. “It’s both a specific attack against AMFA and a very expensive, but very dramatic message to other unions that Northwest means business.”

Peter Fiske, a member at-large of the Professional Flight Attendants Association, said his union is taking note of the treatment of AMFA members.

“It has sent a message to all the unions that we are back to the days of ... union busting,” he said, noting that Northwest recently presented a proposal that the union estimates could outsource 5,600 of its 9,736 jobs.

The airline industry, battered by financial losses in the past four years, is awash in laid-off skilled workers.

One replacement mechanic who has worked in the past week for the airline, and who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said he was trained for two weeks with other mechanics at a hotel in Tucson, Ariz., in July.

He said mechanics, who are being housed in local hotels, are working 12-hour days. He said he was paid $21 per hour for eight hours and $32 per overtime hour for the seven nights he worked since the strike started Aug. 19.

Top Northwest mechanics were paid $35 per hour before the strike.

The replacement worker said he took the job because he had been making $7 an hour in retail sales. He said he was dismissed Friday after complaining about other replacement workers performing substandard work. But he said the firm that had contracted his services for Northwest told him he was being fired for his performance.

Will Holman, a spokesman for the Northwest branch of the Air Line Pilots Association, said management should be cautious about assuming the model it has adopted with AMFA can translate to other workers.

Holman said it “would be a big mistake for Northwest management to think this is open season on unions.”

In the case of pilots, he said, the training, time and money needed to have a group of replacements would be prohibitively expensive.

Marick Masters, a professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh, noted that even the premise of “replacing workers with the implicit intent to continue operations without union representation is unusual in the airline industry.”

But these are unusual times for the airlines.

Because of downsizing at many carriers, there is a ready supply of FAA-licensed mechanics looking for work. Northwest has said its pool of replacements has worked for US Airways, United, Delta and Continental, as well as UPS and some large aircraft repair stations.

There are no replacement workers without strikes, which are becoming more rare as the ranks of organized labor dwindle.

Since airline industry deregulation in 1978, there have been 16 strikes, but just four since 1990, the last one occurring seven years ago.

Some analysts say the last example comparable to the tactic Northwest is using now was in the 1980s, when Eastern Airlines used replacement workers after its machinists went on strike and other unions joined them. The airline folded in 1991.

Labor experts say there may be more parallels, though, between the Northwest-AMFA standoff and the dispute between air-traffic controllers and President Ronald Reagan more than two decades ago. More than 11,000 flight controllers were fired for striking and permanently replaced.

AMFA members, like the air-traffic controllers, are highly skilled workers who often have been deemed indispensable.

“AMFA is small union, isolated from other unions, and sometimes hostile with them, and with not much bigger a strategy than skill and courage,” Shaiken said. “This is how you would describe the air controllers.”

Payback to AMFA?

Born in 1998 out of what the AFL-CIO considered a raid on the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), which previously represented the mechanics, AMFA would not consider pay cuts when other airline unions were taking them.

In what Chaison of Clark University calls a “remarkable” rift in relations among unions, Northwest’s pilots, flight attendants and baggage handlers are not honoring the picket lines.

Chaison said he believes the unions are making a big mistake by not doing more to help the Northwest strikers.

“The American labor movement is saying this is payback to AMFA,” Chaison said, but the other unions’ inaction could embolden other companies to try the same tactics.

Shaiken agreed. “If you can replace mechanics, among the most skilled jobs,” he asked, “who exactly can’t you replace?”