DETROIT – Union mechanics and plane cleaners at Northwest Airlines Inc. followed the advice of their labor leaders Friday and voted to continue their four-month-long strike.
Mechanics rejected a proposed settlement that offered four weeks of severance pay. It would have made strikers eligible for future job openings, but would have returned no one to work immediately.
Fifty-seven percent, or 1,258 of the 2,223 mechanics and plane cleaners who voted, rejected the contract; 73 percent of the striking members voted.
“We’ve got the minds and the hearts of our members,” said O.V. Delle-Femine, national director of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, who had told members to reject the offer. “We’re going to be here as long as the last guy is on the picket line.”
Northwest said it was disappointed with the results. “A ratified agreement would have ended the mechanics’ strike and allowed both parties to move forward,” the airline said in a statement Friday.
Northwest has replaced its union mechanics and, as it had planned before the strike, outsourced much of its aircraft-cleaning work.
Harris Brown, a Northwest mechanic for 15 years, said he had trouble deciding how to vote.
The former Wyandotte, Mich., resident moved to Tucson, Ariz., last month to take a job with Evergreen Air Center, an aircraft maintenance outsourcing firm – which happens to be the same company that provided the facility for Northwest to train its replacements.
He said he still believes in the strike, but he voted for the contract for about $4,200 in severance pay.
“The way I look at it, there’s nothing to go back to,” said Brown, 46.
The proposal is the first one the union had put to a vote among its members.
Northwest’s union mechanics and plane cleaners went on strike in August, protesting a contract that would have cut nearly half the work force and cut pay by 25 percent.
The airline’s proposals grew worse over time, offering to bring back fewer workers as Northwest began hiring permanent replacements in October.
The union’s leaders refused all the airline’s previous offers, citing severance pay as insufficient and rule changes that limited the union’s authority to discipline members.
While AMFA leaders took the results as a victory, labor experts said it does little more than boost the union’s ego.
“I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a strike that has been as clearly lost as this one,” said Gary Chaison, professor of management at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “All the membership wanted to do was make a statement in their defeat.”
Delle-Femine leads a union that in 1998 swayed – many say stole – Northwest mechanics from another union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents ground workers and is part of the AFL-CIO.
Wounds from that battle showed up in this one. AMFA garnered no support from other Northwest unions and only sporadic support from other labor groups.
Delle-Femine, who says his members know they won’t go back to Northwest with a contract, has a different view.
“It would be a clear loss if we accepted this contract. It’s not a loss when we still have the pickets out there,” he said.
Although the strike continues, picket lines have dwindled. Many strikers have moved on to new jobs. And Northwest has carried on its operations with 880 replacement mechanics.
In other Northwest news, the airline – which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September – seeks to extend the deadline for when it can be the only party to file a plan to exit bankruptcy. That deadline currently is Jan. 12. Northwest wants to extend that until July 13, according to court papers filed Friday. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Jan. 10.
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AP-NY-12-30-05 1914EST
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