Judge Bars Strike by Northwest Attendants
A federal judge ordered Northwest Airlines Corp. flight attendants to remain on the job Friday, giving the carrier and travelers a reprieve from a damaging work stoppage.
Northwest’s 7,300 flight attendants had planned to disrupt the airline’s operations beginning at 7 p.m. Pacific time Friday to protest sharp wage and benefit cuts. But U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said he would bar the flight attendants from striking or carrying out other disruptive tactics.
The order will remain in effect while Marrero decides whether to issue a permanent injunction against a strike.
“Obviously we’re disappointed, but we’re quite confident that we do have the right to strike and that when it goes to the appeals level, the judge will see it our way,” said Les Meeks, interim president of the 500-member L.A. branch of the Assn. of Flight Attendants.
In the meantime, he said, “we will abide by the judge’s order.”
Northwest said it had contingency plans to keep operating if the flight attendants walked out but it wouldn’t reveal them. When the Egan, Minn.-based carrier’s mechanics walked off the job a year ago, it hired replacement workers and kept flying with only scattered cancellations.
The flight attendants’ union had hoped to outmaneuver the airline by employing a strategy dubbed CHAOS, for “creating havoc around our system.” The plan calls for surprise walkouts targeting individual Northwest flights, all of the carrier’s flights from one city or the airline’s entire system.
“With our strategy of unannounced, intermittent strikes, it throws the airline off balance,” Meeks said. “The company has no idea where to have its contingent workforce in place.”
At Los Angeles International Airport on Friday evening, about 25 union members walked an informational picket line in front of Terminal 2, where Northwest has its gates. Picketers wore T-shirts with “CHAOS” logos and recited chants such as, “Hey hey, ho ho, corporate greed has got to go!”
“When we leave, we leave for three to four days,” said union member Maricela DelGado, who was walking the picket line with her 3-year-old son and 7-week-old daughter. “That’s not going to be worth it with the pay cuts.”
Northwest, the nation’s fifth-largest carrier, is the No. 7 airline at LAX, with 21 daily departures and 3.7% market share. However, it dominates service to its hub airports, providing six of LAX’s seven daily nonstop flights to Detroit and eight of nine to Minneapolis.
For companies with extensive ties to those destinations, a disruption of Northwest’s service would be painful.
Detroit-based General Motors Corp., for example, has several facilities around the Southland. Most of the travel between here and the home office is on Northwest “because it’s the only direct flight they can get,” GM spokesman Jeff Holland said.
“It’s great that they’re still flying. I hope it holds up,” he said.
With most airplanes flying full or nearly so this summer, Northwest ticket holders could have a hard time finding seats on other airlines if the flight attendants succeed in grounding a significant number of flights.
“There’s a scarcity of seats in this market,” said Paul Haney, deputy executive director of airports and security for L.A.’s airport agency. “If there were a strike that caused Northwest to cease operations, there would be about 7,000 passengers a day [at LAX] scrambling to make other arrangements.”
Even so, travelers seem to be taking Northwest’s latest labor standoff in stride.
“So far, we don’t see people booking away from Northwest,” said Terry Trippler of myvacationpassport.com. “Would I book a ticket on Northwest for travel in September? Yes, I would.”
Patti Babij, general manager of Mickey Redmond Travels and Tours in Detroit, said, “In our world today, people have faced more pressing travel dilemmas than this, so I think people just roll with the punches.”
Amy Tostrud of Los Angeles has family in Minneapolis and flies Northwest frequently. She bought her ticket a month ago but didn’t consider switching to another carrier despite the looming strike.
“I’m pretty confident in the airline,” she said while waiting in line at LAX. “It’s a great airline.”
In his ruling, Marrero said Northwest made a “persuasive case” that a delay was necessary so the legal issues could be resolved. He acknowledged that delaying a strike was a blow to the union, but “far greater injuries exist to Northwest and the public by permitting the strike to commence at this point.”
The union threatened to strike after Northwest imposed a contract that saves it $195 million annually but cuts flight attendant wages and benefits 40%, Meeks said.
Northwest has been wringing wage concessions out of all of its employee groups as part of its plan for emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A bankruptcy judge upheld the union’s right to strike. But Northwest, which lost $285 million in the second quarter, asked Marrero to overturn that ruling, saying a strike could kill the airline. The Bush administration and 20 airlines also asked Marrero to block a strike.
Marrero urged Northwest and the union to resume negotiations and said he would give them until Wednesday to tell him whether fruitful talks were possible. If not, Marrero said he would decide the case at a date that was hard to predict “given the complexity of this matter.”
*
Times staff writer Kimi Yoshino contributed to this report and the Associated Press was used in compiling it.
