Mesaba unions team up to fight cuts
Experts say this is first time groups have worked so closely

BY JEWEL GOPWANI
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

June 26, 2006

Workers at Mesaba Airlines have employed a rarely used strategy to fight
the steep wage and benefit cuts their employer demands.

They're sticking together.

Separate union leaders for about 1,400 Mesaba flight attendants, pilots
and mechanics are sharing everything from legal experts to strike
strategies as they try to scale back proposals for wage and benefit cuts
as the company reorganizes under Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Today, Mesaba is due in a Minneapolis courtroom to ask a bankruptcy judge,
for a second time, to throw out contracts for those workers, allowing the
carrier to impose wage and benefit cuts.

All three unions say they would strike if the airline implemented terms, a
move Mesaba says would be illegal. But the courts have yet to rule on that
issue.

Mesaba, a commuter carrier for Northwest Airlines, operates 85 daily
flights out of Detroit Metro Airport, to 14 destinations, including Alpena
and Marquette.

Thousands of airline workers have taken wage and benefit cuts since the
most recent wave of airline bankruptcy filings started in 2002.

But airline and labor experts say this is the first time three separate
unions have worked so closely to keep as much of their pay and benefits as
they can.

"The unions have gotten their act together. It's a very rare instance that
this actually happens," said Gary Chaison, professor of management at
Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

By contrast, unions at Northwest Airlines handled contract talks on their
own.

No union, as a whole, supported a strike by union mechanics in August.
While union leaders communicated -- in one case through a letter from the
pilots telling other unions to do their part -- there was no similar show
of solidarity across the unions.

Union negotiators for the Association of Flight Attendants, the Air Line
Pilots Association and the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association hold
regular conference calls, and talk after one group wraps up a bargaining
session with the company.

Lawyers for the three unions disperse tasks to those best fit to carry
them out.

If the groups strike, they'll coordinate their plans. If deals can be
reached, union leaders hope workers across the three groups can vote on
contract proposals at the same time, said Tom Wychor, who leads Mesaba's
pilots union.

"You put a lot of good people together who have the same interest of
protecting Mesaba employees' careers and you can come up with good ideas
that we can all get behind and share," Wychor said.

Mesaba spokeswoman Elizabeth Costello, said the airline understands the
unions' "camaraderie in this difficult time," and said "the coordination
among the groups has not presented a problem with respect to our need for
concessions."

But, Neil Bernstein, a labor professor at Washington University in St.
Louis, said if unions "don't talk to each other, then it gives the
employer an enormous advantage."

By the end of the year, Mesaba expects to fly 49 planes, or half of the
100 aircraft it flew this time last year.

To survive, the carrier's management says it can accept nothing less than
19.4% wage and benefit cuts over the next six years. That combination,
leaders for all three unions say, is unacceptable.

The labor coalition at Mesaba has energized workers, who have been showing
up to support each other at rallies and picket lines at airports.

"It certainly makes employees feel good ... that management has not been
able to divide and conquer," said Brad Bartholomew, with the Southlake,
Texas-based airline labor management firm the Newfoundland Group.

But, if the stalemate continues, there's a chance a bankruptcy judge could
throw out the contracts and deem a strike illegal.

"With a stroke of his pen these efforts could be for naught," Bartholomew
said.
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