American Scraps 129 Friday Flights Overseas
American Airlines and its pilots failed to make headway in resolving their bitter labor dispute Wednesday, leading the No. 2 U.S. carrier to cancel nearly all its overseas flights Friday night.
“There’s no progress so far,” the Allied Pilots Assn., representing the American pilots, said after the daylong negotiations. “A strike is more likely than not.”
The union vowed to strike Friday at midnight EST if no new labor agreement is reached, disrupting travel for the 200,000 passengers the airline carries each day on its 2,200 routes worldwide.
With the strike prospect looming, American scrapped 129 round trips scheduled to leave Friday. The only flights that will go ahead are 12 to Heathrow and two to Gatwick airport in London.
Return flights Saturday were also canceled, spokesman Tim Smith said in Dallas.
He said the carrier would reschedule its international passengers to Europe, the Far East and Latin America on earlier American flights or on other airlines.
American’s president, Donald Carty, in Washington for the negotiations, said, “In fairness to our customers, these are big journeys, and important journeys, for people. We ought to give them the chance to go Thursday night if they choose.”
Later, pilots spokesman David Bates said “the pilots would consider flying if they got an agreement on the regional-jets issue without a formal agreement made.”
One of the main issues has been American’s plan to fly regional jets with the lower-paid pilots of its regional carrier, American Eagle, who belong to another union. American says it needs to make the move to compete with smaller carriers, but the APA has rejected it.
Kenneth Hipp, chairman of the National Mediation Board, which is participating in the talks, told reporters that the negotiations were going “slowly with increasing difficulty.”
But he added that in the past labor agreements were often written in the latter hours of negotiations.
Earlier, American made a new pay offer to the pilots--increasing its offer to 6% over four years, from its previous offer of 5%, but withdrawing one of two stock options it included.
The pilots, who had asked for an increase of 11.5%, rejected the proposal, saying its overall effect was a package reduced in value by $43 million.
At the White House, President Clinton urged the sides to use the mediation process to resolve their dispute, which he said had huge implications for the country.
“I want to say that the time has not yet expired and I want to encourage parties to make maximum use of the mediation board process,” Clinton said.
The National Mediation Board could declare that a strike would cause substantial damage to the economy or a region of it and urge the president to set up an emergency board to try to resolve the lengthy dispute.
Such a board would keep planes flying while it tried to fashion an agreement acceptable to both sides. But if it failed, the union would be free to strike.
In 1993, Clinton stepped into an American dispute with its flight attendants, ending a five-day pre-Thanksgiving Day strike by setting up an emergency board to find a solution. Both sides agreed to binding arbitration.
A strike is certain to hit air travel hard in many major U.S. cities where American has hubs, including American’s home base at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and airports in New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Officials in San Juan said a strike would be devastating to the lucrative Caribbean tourist business, now at its midwinter height. They said American and American Eagle provide 70% of the region’s aviation services.
American has said it had made arrangements for its tickets to be accepted by other airlines, but travel agents say there would probably not be enough seats available on other carriers to handle all the stranded American passengers.
