BLOOMINGTON, Minn. (AP) – Mechanics at Northwest Airlines vowed to continue their strike on Tuesday, even as the airline said it had begun hiring permanent replacements.

With the walkout in its fourth week, about 200 mechanics rallied at the union’s strike headquarters in a hotel parking lot near Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where their leaders told them Northwest’s fill-in maintenance operation can’t last.

“If we stay strong, if you don’t cross that picket line, the company will have no choice but to contact us,” said Jim Young, chief negotiator for the Aircraft Maintenance Fraternal Association.

Ted Ludwig, president of the union’s Twin Cities local, also urged strikers to stick together.

“If you want to work at a nonunion place, go to Wal-Mart. Don’t go back in here,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at a Northwest maintenance hangar in the distance.

Northwest is the fourth-largest carrier at the Portland International Jetport in Maine.

The two sides haven’t met since early Sunday morning, when mechanics walked away from an offer that sought even more concessions than they rejected before striking.

Northwest spokesman Kurt Ebenhoch would not talk in detail about the permanent hiring of replacements, saying only that the process was “under way and proceeding smoothly.”

In a letter to the union late Monday, a Northwest executive urged the union leaders to allow a vote on the airline’s latest offer.

“We prefer a deal with AMFA to no deal, and we believe our employees deserve the right to vote on a deal before permanent replacement workers are hired,” said the letter from Julie Hagen Showers, the company’s vice president of labor relations.

Mechanics at Tuesday’s rally didn’t appear unhappy that their leadership wasn’t sending them an offer. When Young asked the crowd whether anyone wanted to vote on the last proposal, they roared, “No!”

Dennis Alm of New Brighton, a mechanic for 26 years, from New Brighton, said the terms proposed by Northwest were not worth it.

“I’d rather quit,” he said.

Union officials have said only a handful of mechanics have crossed the picket line and sought to portray Northwest as growing desperate.

“Northwest is naive to think that substantial numbers of AMFA members will cross the lines to save management’s bacon,” AMFA’s national director, O.V. Delle-Femine, said in a prepared statement.

“That’s not going to happen.”

But John Fossum, a labor relations professor at the University of Minnesota, said he still expected any settlement to be on the company’s terms. Movement by Northwest is “not plausible unless the company has problems operating, which doesn’t appear to be the case at this point.”

Northwest’s last offer before talks broke off would retain the jobs of 1,080 mechanics, down from a pre-strike union work force of about 4,400 workers. The larger figure includes some 800 cleaners whose jobs, Northwest says, have already been permanently shifted to contractors.

Northwest mechanics averaged about $70,000 a year in pay before the strike. The airline had been seeking pay cuts of about 25 percent before the walkout, but since then they have raised an overall concessions target to $203 million from $176 million.

Northwest has said previously that bankruptcy is a possibility. The company, which is in talks with all of its unions, has raised its $1.1 billion target for annual labor cost savings to a new, undisclosed figure, as rising fuel prices have battered the airline.

John Remington, a labor relations professor at the University of Minnesota, said it was hard to gauge how a Chapter 11 filing would affect the standoff with mechanics.

“Filing for bankruptcy doesn’t make this one go away,” Remington said. “It may make it less urgent to deal with, but the fact of the matter is these guys are still on strike, and they’re still hurting Northwest’s business to some extent.”

Union officials had said Sunday that only differences over severance and work rules remained. But Rich Nygaard, a negotiator at Tuesday’s rally, also said Northwest was seeking a five-year contract that would have run through 2011 with no raises; Nygaard said the union wanted a three-year deal with two raises.

AMFA members got a financial boost Tuesday from the United Auto Workers, which donated $880,000 – or about $200 for each striking AMFA member.

“Northwest Airlines’ behavior toward AMFA is blatant union-busting and an insult to every American worker,” UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said in a statement announcing the donation. “The UAW is proud to offer this support to AMFA members.”

Bob Rose, president of the AMFA local in Detroit, said the money would be distributed by the local to striking AMFA members nationwide.

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Joshua Freed can be reached at jfreed(at)ap.org

AP-ES-09-13-05 1722EDT