No matter how the negotiations at Mesaba Aviation Inc. turn out, travelers were expected to see no disruption on Thursday as the feeder for Northwest Airlines reached a deadline for getting pay cuts from workers.
Mesaba, which is reorganizing under bankruptcy protection, said it planned to impose pay cuts at 12:01 a.m. CDT on Thursday if workers didn't agree to a deal first. Mesaba spokeswoman Elizabeth Costello said the airline might hold off if it was close to a deal. Either way, the unions pledged to obey a judge's order barring strikes.
Costello said negotiations with flight attendants and mechanics were under way Wednesday in advance of the deadline. Pilot spokesman Kris Pierson said they planned negotiations as well.
Mesaba has permission from a bankruptcy judge to impose cuts that would slice 17.5 percent of its labor costs, with pay cuts for workers ranging from 6 percent to 11 percent. Some pilots, who make about $45,000 a year, are taking larger cuts because they're also being shifted to smaller aircraft as Mesaba's fleet shrinks.
Those planned cuts had prompted strike threats from the unions. But Bankruptcy Judge Gregory Kishel on Monday barred the unions from striking. They've promised appeals, but not before the deadline. And they pledged to abide by Kishel's order, which blocked everything from full-scale strikes to even encouraging a slowdown.
'There will be no disruption' to passengers, said Air Line Pilots Association spokesman Kris Pierson. He said pilots plan 'to work exactly how we always work. There's an injunction in place, we will be obeying the law.'
If they don't make a deal, the unions could still win the right to strike either by winning their appeals of Kishel's order, or working through the requirements of the Railway Labor Act, which generally prohibits strikes except after a mediator has declared an impasse and a 30-day cooling-off period has ended.
Mesaba, a unit of MAIR Holdings Inc., flies to about 86 cities. It filed for bankruptcy protection in October 2005, about a month after Northwest, its largest customer, did the same thing.
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Copyright 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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