Posted online by John Gillie
at 7:33 a.m. Wednesday
It's been more than a year now since the Air Line Pilots Association and Alaska Airlines first traded proposals for a new contract, and the two sides still have much to accomplish.
But the parties announced this week that they'd reached a tentative agreement on four more contract sections: pay guarantee, deadheading, hours of service and scheduling.
"This is a complex area of the contract, which explains the time it took for the parties to reach a tentative agreement," said Dennis Hamel, Alaska's vice president of human resources and labor relations.
Remaining to be resolved are the meat-and-potatoes issues: health care, retirement, scope and compensation.
The negotiations promise to be especially difficult because the pilots took big pay cuts during the last contract as a result of a mandatory arbitration clause. This time the contract has no such clause, opening up the possibility of a strike.
