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August 22, 2005
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| Northwest Airlines employees protest outside of the Minneapolis/St. Paul International airport on Sunday. (Photo by Jayme Halbritter/Getty Images ) |
St. Paul, Minn. — You could gauge some of the effects of the Northwest's mechanics strike this past weekend by travellers' body language at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.
Judy Olson hurried eagerly to the check-in counter to catch her flight back home to New York. Her pace was slowed only by a question put to her, and not by dread of delays.
"I've been watching every night to see what was happening. I checked to be sure that my flight was right going, and it's going. I never considered changing it. Northwest has always come through," she said.
And over in the baggage claim area, Laura Vanderbelt furrowed her brow as she waited for her suitcase to emerge from the drop. Her plane left Chicago a half hour late. And she was frustrated because she says the airline didn't alert that flight's passengers to the delay.
"There was no indication. No sign. I didn't hear a word. Nobody said anything to me," she said.
Vanderbelt says she's a business traveller, and will try not to book on Northwest anytime soon.
"I probably won't be flying Northwest until they resolve their issues," according to Vanderbelt.
And at another baggage claim drop, Lou Campos was doing hamstring stretches to loosen up after sitting an extra three hours on his plane from Detroit. Northwest's Web site indicated the delay was due to "non-scheduled maintenance."
Campos says the hold-up was a minor irritation and won't keep him from booking with the airline again. But there are other factors involved.
"When you fly from Detroit to Minneapolis, you don't really have a lot of choices. It's Northwest and that's just about it," Campos said.
Those three travellers' experience give a rough overview of Northwest's performance over the weekend. Many passengers didn't cancel their travel plans with the airline in spite of concerns about the strike. And overall, the Metropolitan Airport Commission reported few delays for the airline's departures and arrivals.
But there were pockets of problems -- in Detroit most notably.
By 9:30 Sunday night, three quarters of the day's flights from Detroit to Minneapolis had been delayed by an hour or longer. And at least half of those delays were due to maintenance issues.
The airline has deployed about 1,500 replacement mechanics to fill in for striking workers. Union mechanics say the replacement workers are not skilled enough to perform the work safely and efficiently.
But Terry Trippler of FareFacts.com says delays related to using replacement mechanics will likely clear up in the coming days. He points to a minor problem faced by a replacement mechanic on a delayed flight to Memphis.
"The mechanic knew how to fix the air conditioning system, it was just a little bit different on Northwest so it took him a little longer. And I think that's the type of delays you're going to experience. Now he will know how to produce that air conditioning system the next time, because he knows how it works," according to Trippler.
But others aren't so sure. Ed Perkins, the associate editor of another industry related Web site SmarterTravel.com, says bigger problems could be in the offing, in spite of Northwest's initial successes in handling the strike.
"Ability to mount a reasonably full schedule immediately was important. I think now that the airline can do that, however, you're going to have to wait more than a few days to see if it can keep doing that," he said.
That's an argument the mechanics union has made. It claims that the cumulative effect of maintenance related problems will eventually cripple Northwest's flights.
But it's all still a matter of speculation, as Ed Perkins acknowledges.
"We haven't had enough of these strikes to come up with ground rules, particularly because we haven't had a strike of this magnitude since the financial crunch began. This is really new territory and I don't think anybody quite knows what's going to happen."
At the very least, Perkins says it will take another two or three weeks to get a better sense of how the airline will really fare.
No new talks are scheduled between Northwest and the union, which is refusing to take pay cuts and layoffs that would have reduced their ranks almost by half.
The union mechanics averaged about $70,000 a year in pay, and cleaners and custodians can make around $40,000. The company wants to cut their wages by about 25 percent.
Northwest also sought to lay off about 2,000 workers, almost halving a work force that is already half the size it was in 2001. The cuts would be concentrated among cleaners and custodians; Northwest has said other airlines use contractors to do that work for less.
AMFA represents nearly 3,500 mechanics, about 790 cleaners and 75 custodians.
Eagan-based Northwest has said it needs $1.1 billion in labor savings. Only pilots have agreed, accepting a 15 percent pay cut worth $300 million when combined with cuts for salaried employees. It is negotiating with ground workers and flight attendants, and it has said it can reopen talks with pilots once it gets concessions from the other groups.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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