United Forced to Halt Service at 89 Airports
United Airlines, which had vowed to keep flying if its 5,000 pilots went on strike, got off to a very limited start Friday, the first full day of a walkout against the nation’s largest carrier.
United was forced to halt service at 89 airports--including 13 of the 15 it normally operates from in California--and severely reduce service at 50 others.
The airline claimed that 11% of its flights were operating. But only seven of the carrier’s 77 scheduled departures from Los Angeles International took off. All 16 scheduled departures from San Diego were canceled, as were all flights from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.
Only 100 Flights
A spokesman for the striking Airline Pilots Assn. said that as of Friday afternoon, only 100 United flights had left the ground.
United Chairman Richard J. Ferris released a statement saying that the company’s contingency plan for a strike was working well.
“With each hour of the day, we’re getting stronger and better and adding more flights,” Ferris said. He added that by midnight, the company would have flown 165 of its 1,566 scheduled departures.
The pilots were aided in their strike by United’s flight attendants, who were directed by their union leaders to observe picket lines. The pilots said that only a smattering of attendants had crossed the lines, and that only 3% of their own members had broken the strike.
Mechanics at Work
Virtually all of United’s ramp personnel and mechanics, who are represented by the International Assn. of Machinists and are operating under a no-strike clause in their contract, reported to work, according to airport observers.
The strike began at 9:01 p.m. Thursday after negotiators for the company and the pilots association failed to reach agreement on United’s demand that it be allowed to hire new pilots at lower starting salaries than it now pays, and to pay them dramatically lower salaries in later years than it pays pilots hired earlier.
Negotiators for the union and the company had been meeting in a Boston hotel throughout the week in an attempt to reach a contract before the end of a federally mandated 30-day cooling-off period. But with the strike now on, both sides left Boston for United’s headquarters in Chicago on Friday, and no new talks have been scheduled.
John Pincavage, an airline analyst with Paine Webber Inc. in New York, said the strike is particularly critical to the union because the profitable United is seeking to make fundamental changes in its wage structure as other airlines have done in the last two years.
Pincavage said that several other carriers, such as American Airlines, have secured so-called two-tier pay scales and that United is seeking such a system in order to compete with them in the future.
The union has said it is willing to accept a two-tier system, but not one as severe as United has proposed. “The union sees this as the trend setter for the industry,” Pincavage said. “Whatever comes out of this United contract is going to be what everyone else wants.”
Last Struck in 1978
United was last struck in 1978, when machinists walked off the job and grounded the airline for 58 days. There has not been a strike by pilots at United since 1951.
The company had vowed for months to continue operations if the pilots walked out. “There’s no question as to the determination of the company to get its costs down,” said Robert Joedicke, an airline analyst with Shearson Lehman Brothers Inc.
At airports around the country Friday, the scene was often chaotic as passengers scrambled to book space on other airlines. Check-in counters for United’s competitors often were overflowing, and in some instances would-be passengers screamed at United personnel and at pickets.
Thousands were angry and frustrated.
One of those was Jeff Tarlowe, 21, a Pomona College student who was trying to get home to Livingston, N.J., after completing his final examinations.
“This has inconvenienced me a lot,” said Tarlowe, as he waited in line at Los Angeles International seeking a plane. “I called (United) last night, and they gave me the runaround and said to come in this morning. The company knew what was going to happen and they waited too long” to do anything about resolving the situation, he said.
Free Trips
Some of the most indignant passengers were those who had taken free trips as part of United’s Mileage Plus program for frequent flyers and had to pay to get home on other airlines.
Among those were Julie and Robert Strasser of Portland, who had spent a week in Hawaii celebrating their third wedding anniversary. When they got to the airport in Honolulu, they were informed that their first-class tickets would not be honored by Western Airlines because they were “no-fare tickets,” Julie Strasser said.
“We had accumulated 75,000 miles to get these tickets, and United said they would give special treatment to their Mileage Plus passengers. They didn’t,” she said while waiting at Los Angeles International for a connecting flight. Their first-class return flights from Honolulu to Portland, Ore., via Los Angeles and Las Vegas cost $797 each.
Robert Strasser, a Portland executive, said he thinks United should have made arrangements to absorb the costs of return flights of Mileage Plus passengers.
“I usually support management in these disputes, but not this time. United’s first move has been to take it out on their passengers. Bring back the Wobblies,” he exclaimed, referring to the Industrial Workers of the World, a militant labor organization whose heyday was in the early years of the 20th Century.
Chuck Novak, United’s manager of corporate communications, said the company was doing as well as it could under the circumstances. He said the company planned to operate at about 11% of capacity throughout the weekend and would gradually increase operations thereafter. He said the company was using management personnel who were trained pilots as temporary replacements and added that new pilots will be hired in the next few days as permanent replacement for the strikers. “If we fill their positions, we won’t need them back,” Novak said, referring to the striking pilots.
Screening Applications
He said the company was screening 5,500 applications from pilots who either have military experience, are now flying for other airlines or are unemployed.
The company had earlier announced that it had trained 500 pilots in preparation for a strike and was prepared to activate them immediately. But David Jewell, a spokesman for the Airline Pilots Assn., said that virtually all of those pilots had decided not to report to work Friday. He said that union observers had checked and that only three of the “pre-hire” pilots reported to work. Novak would not comment on that report.
Dick Rogers, spokesman for the United pilots in Los Angeles, said he thought the strike was going well.
“We were well prepared; we learned a lot from Continental,” he said, referring to the airline his union has been striking for 21 months since that company declared bankruptcy and abrogated its labor agreements.
United pilot O. B. Phillips said he was saddened that he had to leave his job.
“We’re disappointed and frustrated, but we think we have to go on strike,” he said. “They’re trying to get two different classes of people--the old hires and the new hires who work at a lower scale. We feel the quality of people in the cockpit will be reduced if you can earn more by going into the Police Department or Fire Department. We feel like we’re protecting our industry for the future.”
United has said its future depends on gaining labor cost concessions from its pilots, whose average salary is $86,540 a year. The company wanted to start new pilots at $21,600, down from the current starting salary of $22,400. Its proposal also would have maintained newly hired pilots at considerably lower salaries for many years, rather than giving them a series of swift raises, which they traditionally have received. “Many of those pilots would have been working at 40% to 50% less than the old hires for up to 25 years,” said Rogers of the pilots union.
Modified Positions
He said that on Thursday, both sides modified their positions, with the pilots telling the company that United could maintain a two-tier pay scale for seven years and then start merging the scales. Originally, the pilots wanted the scales to merge after five years.
Rogers said the company indicated that it would not be willing to merge the scales until after 15 years, and the two sides deadlocked at that point. United would not comment on details of the bargaining.
Other airlines moved swiftly to meet the demands on passengers seeking alternatives to United.
American Airlines, one of United’s leading competitors, increased its reservations staffing and telephone capacity by 50% Friday, said spokesman Lowell Duncan. He said American also had set up special check-in areas for people with United tickets.
“All of our transcontinental flights are full. Our Hawaii flights are full. The New York-Chicago routes and Chicago-L.A. routes are very heavy,” Duncan said.
Glenn Bozarth, a spokesman for Western, said that carrier had been able to accommodate a lot of passengers, particularly people flying from California airports to Portland, Ore., Seattle and Anchorage.
Still, he said, “it’s like Christmas.” Bozarth said Western might schedule some extra flights during the strike but only on a spot basis.
Times staff writers Andy Furillo and Jerry Belcher in Los Angeles, Maria LaGanga in San Diego and researcher Wendy Leopold in Chicago contributed to this story.
