US Airways Workers OK Unionization

Providing the biggest private-sector recruiting victory for any U.S. union in more than a decade, passenger service employees at US Airways have voted to join the Communications Workers of America, officials said Monday.

If it survives a pending court challenge by the company, the election will provide union representation for close to 10,000 US Airways employees, including ticket counter, reservations and airport gate workers.

The election win by CWA, however, was clouded somewhat by a separate showdown nearing a climax between the airline and its pilots union. Officials of US Airways, the nation’s sixth-biggest airline, have said they will shrink the company into a smaller, regional carrier--putting many current employees out of work--if they don’t come to terms with the pilots by the end of today on a cost-cutting labor contract.

But late Monday, a spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Assn. said the two sides were making “substantial progress” in their marathon negotiations in Washington. If the talks succeed, it will clear the way for the airline to go ahead with a previously announced agreement to buy at least 120 Airbus Industrie planes to modernize the company’s fleet.

Meanwhile, CWA officials and other union advocates were buoyant about the outcome of the union representation vote by the passenger service workers. They characterized it as a landmark victory in the campaign by U.S. unions and the American labor movement’s parent organization, the AFL-CIO, to revitalize themselves by stepping up recruiting efforts.

Larry Cohen, CWA’s national organizing director, noted that the group of workers backing the union have salaries averaging roughly $30,000 a year--far more than the targets of many union-organizing campaigns.

“To carry this majority, middle-class Americans said: ‘We want a union of our own. We want a voice here,’ ” Cohen said.

Labor leaders said the US Airways election was the biggest block of private-sector workers to approve a union as its bargaining representative since 1987. At that time, a group of 15,000 employees at Northwest Airlines elected to join the International Assn. of Machinists.

Experts said this week’s victory was even more impressive in some respects because the US Airways passenger service workers, unlike the Northwest employees, had no previous union affiliation. At Northwest, workers were choosing from two unions actively competing to represent them after a company merger led to an inter-union dispute.

CWA organizers said they faced substantial hurdles at US Airways, obstacles that resulted in two previous failures to unionize the company’s passenger service workers over the last two years. For one thing, the union needed more than a simple majority of the ballots cast in the 8 1/2-week, vote-by-mail election in order to succeed.

Because the election was governed by the comparatively restrictive Railway Labor Act, any worker who did not return a ballot was regarded as voting against unionization. As a result, the CWA needed to win a majority of all 8,772 eligible voters among the passenger service workers with the airline.

In the tally released Monday by the National Mediation Board, the independent agency overseeing the election, the CWA netted 4,773 ballots, or 54% of those eligible to vote. The remaining 233 ballots received by the board were either invalid, void or cast for other unions.

The CWA campaign, launched nearly three years ago at a reservations center in San Diego, had suffered a major setback in January in a previous vote where the union garnered 3,973 votes, 664 short of what it needed.

The National Mediation Board later ruled, however, that US Airways improperly tried to influence workers before that vote, leading to the rerun election that was decided Monday.

In a terse prepared statement, US Airways said it will continue pressing its suit in U.S. District Court to strike down the board’s decision to order the second election. Meanwhile, however, the company also said it “will comply with all legal obligations stemming from today’s election.”

For the nation’s top union officials, the CWA victory was savored as a sign that organized labor’s new commitment to organizing workers over the last two years is beginning to pay off. John J. Sweeney, who won an insurgent campaign to take the presidency of the AFL-CIO two years ago and who was reelected to a new four-year term last week, issued a statement calling the election “more evidence that workers are turning to unions to get decent wages, good benefits and the respect they deserve.”

While agreeing that the election was a major victory for organized labor, UCLA labor economist Daniel J.B. Mitchell noted that the CWA also had some advantages in its campaign that unions often don’t have. Chief among them, Mitchell noted, is that the airline industry already is widely unionized.

In fact, union officials said a major motivation for the passenger service workers to vote for union representation is that they felt they suffered far more from the company’s cost cutbacks than did other workers such as pilots, machinists and flight attendants, who already belonged to unions. They complained of a wage freeze and cutbacks in pension benefits and paid time off.

“We were the only department in the company not to have union representation. We had no one to go to the [bargaining] table for us,” said Josie Esposito, a reservations sales agent for US Airways in San Diego who also served as a local leader in the CWA’s organizing campaign.

For the future of US Airways, however, the ongoing pilot contract negotiations and the future of the Airbus order may be even more pivotal than the CWA election victory. They also are major tests for US Airways Chairman Stephen M. Wolf, a veteran airline executive whom the carrier hired in early 1996 to lower its operating costs, which are among the highest of major U.S. airlines.

Labor accounted for 43% of US Airways’ total operating expenses last year, well above the average for other big domestic airlines, according to analyst Jeffrey Long of J.P. Morgan Securities.

Wolf, a former chief executive of UAL Inc.’s flagship United Airlines, is known for taking a hard line with organized labor.

Still, his push for cost savings in talks with the pilots comes at an awkward time for the company. Although US Airways’ costs were especially pressing in the early 1990s, when the airline lost more than $3 billion, the carrier is taking part in the overall surge in the airline industry’s fortunes and is much more prosperous today. And organized labor wants to share the benefits of the airline’s recovery.

Last year, US Airways’ profit more than doubled from the prior year, to $263.4 million on revenue of $8.1 billion. Then, in this year’s second quarter, the airline posted its best three months ever, earning $205.6 million on revenue of $2.2 billion.

Nonetheless, Wolf has threatened to shrink the airline and focus largely on East Coast routes if it doesn’t win concessions in a pilots contract. However, he also has told the pilots union that if the airline can obtain the cost savings it seeks, that US Airways--and its pilots’ flying time--will grow faster than the industry average over the next five years.

Wall Street, meanwhile, appeared to bet Monday that US Airways will strike a deal with the pilots. The stock of the airline’s parent, US Airways Group Inc., jumped $1.81 a share to a 52-week high of $42.69 in New York Stock Exchange trading.

US Airways serves more than 200 airports in 39 states and several foreign countries, and its major hub cities are Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charlotte, N.C. The airline, which has about 42,000 employees and a fleet of 382 jets, also operates the busy Shuttle service between Boston, New York and Washington.