As mechanics at United Airlines began preparing for a strike, airline and union officials moved quickly Wednesday to schedule high-stakes talks after the carrier’s contract offer was soundly rejected.
Union and company officials plan to meet Friday in Chicago, and both sides are hoping to avert a walkout. United can ill-afford any more turmoil after losing $2.1 billion last year, and the mechanics are eager for their first raise since 1994.
Key to reaching an agreement, union officials say, is removal of a provision that would require mechanics to match any wage concession negotiated between the airline and its other unions.
“The membership would not have been thrilled, but I think [the contract] would have been ratified if that provision had not been in the proposal,” said an official of District Lodge 141-M of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
United declined to comment.
The uncertainty surrounding a strike, which could begin at 11:01 p.m. CST Tuesday, already is causing some unease within corporate travel departments.
“A lot of them will look for some other alternative in case something happens,” said Jonathan Schrader, airline analyst for Chicago-based Morningstar Inc.
“United definitely can get the deal done. But with that said, they may have to give up more than they would like to, just as they did two years ago with their pilots.”
United agreed to give its pilots a 25 percent raise in August 2000, after a summer of delayed departures and 26,000 canceled flights. Union positions had hardened after United entered merger discussions with US Airways before it completed talks with its pilots.
The deal set pay for a Boeing 737 captain at $175,000, while a 747 captain is paid $260,000. Those were 10 percent higher than rates then being paid by other airlines.
Under the proposal rejected by two-thirds of union members voting Tuesday, United’s 13,000 mechanics would have received as much as a 37 percent raise.
A top United mechanic now paid $25.60 per hour would have received a raise to $35.14, retroactive to July 2000, when the mechanics’ old contract came up for renewal. Subsequent raises would have pushed the mechanics pay to $37.54 by the end of the five-year pact.
Although United on Wednesday notified the White House of the mechanics vote, sources said the carrier does not plan to ask President Bush or Congress to intervene.
Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, this week told Bush and Congress to let negotiators settle the dispute.
Bush, who blocked a strike by the United mechanics a few days before Christmas, would need Congress’ help to avert a walkout.
Lawmakers have several options. They could adopt the contract recommendations of a Presidential Emergency Board, appointed by Bush in December; they could appoint a new emergency board; or they could order another 60-day cooling-off period to allow company and union officials to develop their own agreement.
Congress has never been asked to intervene in an airline labor dispute.
“We don’t want to negotiate a strike,” Buffenbarger said. “We want a new contract, a good contract, that will meet the needs and expectations of our members.”
Schrader said United should have known the concession clause would cause trouble. Getting rid of the linkage provision “would go a long way to getting a deal done,” he said.
Tom Reardon, assistant general chairman of District 141-M, said the airline’s effort to obtain concessions from its employees angered many members even before they saw the contract, which would have required them to go along with any deal struck by pilots and flight attendants.
Reardon, referring to wage concessions granted the airline in 1994, when employees acquired a 55 percent stake in the company, said any talk of concessions is problematic.
“My membership and I are not inclined to make sacrifices to the same group of people who squandered the sacrifices we made in the past,” he said.
“No other airline is asking for additional concessions from their employees,” Reardon said, noting that most are beginning to recover from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
