Northwest CEO Calls Replacements 'Dream Team'

Northwest chief executive Doug Steenland is touting the quality of the airline's replacement workforce that is helping the airline keep flying during the mechanics strike.

In an interview, he described operations as going well, noting that the maintenance crews are composed not only of the trained 1,200 temporary replacements but also of 350 licensed maintenance managers who are key players in making the company's strike contingency plan work.

"That group basically represents the best mechanics that existed in all of Northwest," he said. Over the course of time, mechanics who are "the best of the best" have been plucked off of hangar floors and invited to join the ranks of management. "This is really the dream team of airline maintenance groups."

The ability of this "dream team," to keep Northwest from experience chronic delays and cancellations is being closely watched. Mechanics believe the airline is struggling far more than its executives admit.

The replacement force has come at a price. In the second quarter, the company spent $20 million training replacement workers on Northwest's procedures and equipment. An internal document suggests the airline will spend $107 million on its contingency plan to keep Northwest in the air during the strike.

Now, as the war of words over Northwest Airlines' operations continues between the company and its 4,400 striking mechanics, pressure is mounting on both sides. The next pivotal moment is expected to be an announcement by the company about its plans to hire permanent replacement workers instead of operating with a temporary work force.

Northwest has shown that it will restructure the airline by paying its workers less and outsourcing more. The threat of new permanent hires will just add a little more momentum to a plan already in motion.

Right now, the airline is operating with 1,200 temporary replacement workers and 350 licensed managers, along with outside vendors.

On the first day of the strike, the company said it would consider hiring permanent replacements. Current replacements are expected to apply.

On Wednesday, Steenland declined to give more specifics. "We haven't made a decision, and we haven't set a timetable for making it," he said in an interview.

But observers said they believe a decision will come soon.

"The next step will be the permanent replacement of mechanics and cleaners," said Harley Shaiken, a labor expert with the University of California, Berkeley. "That is what Northwest will announce sooner rather than later."

No talks have been scheduled in the dispute, which enters its sixth day today. Mechanics union officials say Northwest's operations are struggling far more than the carrier admits. They expect their leverage will improve as problems mount.

They greet the prospect of permanent replacements with a shrug. "If they can find mechanics willing to work under the terms that Northwest wanted to pay, more power to them," said Steve MacFarlane, assistant national director of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association. "We refuse to work under those conditions, and we are prepared to walk away and start our lives somewhere else."

To move ahead, Northwest could use an outsourcing company and possibly invite subcontractors to bid on the Northwest maintenance work. The subcontractor would employ the mechanics.

"That is one way that corporations like Northwest can subcontract the labor relations issues as well as the work," said Rebecca Givan, an assistant professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Yet Northwest and its mechanics union are obligated to continue bargaining even if replacements become permanent. "We are always prepared to do that," said Steenland.

If the company does decide to hire permanent replacements, the strike could continue and the pressure on the airline to settle would not magically disappear. "The picket lines stay up, the publicity stays out there," said Wesley Wildman, a labor attorney and professor of public policy at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.