Airline, Attendants Avert a Strike
Flight attendants at America West Airlines reached an agreement with the carrier late Friday night, de-escalating a bitter four-year fight over pay that brought the airline to the brink of a strike.
The talks had been extended past a scheduled deadline. If no agreement had been reached by 9:01 p.m. Friday, the 2,300 flight attendants were free to strike.
Shortly after the hour had passed, word came that the talks in Washington had been extended. Later, a union representative told a crowd assembled outside the airline’s Phoenix headquarters that an agreement had been reached.
No details were available, but the crowd was told the flight attendants got what they wanted. Chants of “we got it” began as many waved clenched fists in the air.
Both sides were negotiating under the supervision of a federal mediator in the hope of ending the contract dispute. A disruption would have come only a month after a pilot sickout forced American Airlines to cancel thousands of flights over the Presidents Day weekend.
A walkout at America West would not have had the same far-reaching impact--American is the second-largest U.S. airline, while America West is ranked ninth--but it would have been acutely felt in the Western states that America West mainly serves.
The hardest-hit cities would have been America West’s hubs in Phoenix, where the airline is based, and Las Vegas.
The airline also serves 15 California airports, including Los Angeles International, Burbank, John Wayne and San Diego. Overall, America West and its 12,000 employees carry an average of 60,000 to 70,000 people a day to more than 90 cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
From John Wayne, America West serves Sacramento, Phoenix and Las Vegas, and is one of the busiest carriers at the airport. The airline generally has about 20 flights on weekdays and 10 to 12 flights a day on weekends.
The union for America West’s attendants, the Assn. of Flight Attendants, was planning a controversial “guerrilla” campaign of work stoppages instead of a blanket, around-the-clock strike if the contract talks failed. The union dubs the strategy CHAOS, for Create Havoc Around Our System.
That could have meant strikes of one day or one week without warning, flight attendants walking off individual flights at random or calling in sick at the last minute. If the actions became too disruptive, America West said, it was considering grounding the airline.
Many travelers already had avoided booking flights on America West.
At Los Angeles International Airport, a stoppage would clearly have been felt. America West ferried 1.4 million travelers through the airport last year, a figure that was ninth among the 80 carriers there, and it operated just over 2% of the airport’s flights, said LAX spokesman Scott Read.
The union used CHAOS once before, in 1993 against Alaska Airlines. After Alaska hired replacements for striking flight attendants, the union sued and a federal judge ruled that the attendants’ actions were legal.
But “in the America West dispute, the airline could simply fire the flight attendants anyway and, if sued by [the union], the airline could hope for a favorable ruling from another judge,” said Neil Bernstein, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. There “is a lot of gray area in the law,” and the Alaska ruling “was highly questionable,” he said.
The latest dispute was one of many that have flared in the airline industry in recent years amid workers’ quest to get a bigger chunk of the industry’s prosperity.
But the wrangling at America West, the main unit of America West Holdings Corp., also pitted a relatively low-paid group of flight attendants against an airline that’s eager to keep its costs down because it flies mostly lower-paying, leisure travel customers.
America West’s flight attendants average $23,000 to $25,000 a year, compared with $35,000 or more at carriers such as American and even Southwest Airlines, which also caters to low-fare patrons.
America West had offered the flight attendants an immediate 16% raise, and a 44.7% pay boost over the five years of a new contract, along with improved work rules and travel expenses. But the union was seeking even higher salaries to lift its members to the industry’s averages.
The airline has had a seesaw performance since emerging from bankruptcy in 1994, though its profit jumped 45% last year to a company record of $109 million, on revenue of $2 billion. Last month, the airline also rejected a takeover bid by United Airlines.
Associated Press and special correspondent Stephen Gregory contributed to this story.
