Clinton Officials to Meet Air Strike’s Negotiators

The White House became more visible Tuesday in attempts to end the nearly 2-week-old pilots’ strike that has shutdown Northwest Airlines Corp., sending a Cabinet member and a presidential aide to Minnesota to meet with both sides.

In a separate development, the Department of Transportation and the Justice Department are expected to file suit today against Northwest and one of its commuter affiliates--Mesaba Aviation--for failing to restart commuter service to 13 small communities in the upper Midwest as ordered by the federal government, an agency spokesman said.

The DOT said it is seeking an injunction requiring the “immediate reinstatement of service to comply with” the earlier DOT order. Elliott Seiden, a Northwest official in Washington, said he couldn’t comment on the suit without seeing it first. Mesaba representatives didn’t respond to calls for comment.

With the airline shut down by the strike and its workers laid off, Mesaba has said it would not be able to comply with the DOT to resume service.

Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater and Deputy White House Counsel Bruce Lindsey, meanwhile flew to Minnesota on Tuesday to meet with negotiators for the company and the Air Line Pilots Assn. in efforts to end the strike at the nation’s fourth-largest airline, a Clinton administration official said.

“[They] are going to assess the situation and to give the president an update,” said the administration official. A Department of Transportation spokesperson said the two are not expected to get directly involved with the negotiations.

About 6,200 pilots struck Northwest on Aug. 28 over issues that include pay and job security.

Since then, Clinton has been asked by elected officials from the upper Midwest states most affected by the strike to call a Presidential Emergency Board and stop the strike, as he did last year when pilots struck at AMR Corp.’s American Airlines. But other members of Congress have urged him not to end the strike, which would be a blow to the pilots’ negotiating position.

Negotiators for both sides were meeting in this Minneapolis suburb separately with a federal mediator Tuesday in exploratory talks geared at determining whether face-to-face negotiations should resume. Northwest has said the two sides are about $180 million a year apart on the entire contract, while ALPA has said that amount is closer to $70 million.

The meetings Tuesday followed similar talks in suburban Chicago during the Labor Day weekend. The meetings are being held under a news blackout imposed by the National Mediation Board.

Northwest, which is based in St. Paul, Minn., has laid off more than 28,000 workers due to the strike. Included in the layoffs are 567 part-time employees who received no-work notices Tuesday.

Sending officials to the talks could be a sign that the White House was becoming more sensitive to economic implications and political pressures from areas affected by the strike, said James Lloyd, former general counsel for US Airways.