Pulled back from a showdown strike by a presidential order, American Airlines and its 9,000 pilots have as far to go as ever toward making peace.
“We have to go another 60 days and we could be on strike again. It’s an emotional roller coaster,” said Jim Sovich, president of the Allied Pilots Association, early Saturday just after President Clinton blocked the pilots’ strike.
Within moments after Sovich told strike leaders to close down the nation’s largest domestic carrier, the White House said Clinton would call for a 60-day cooling off period.
It was a rare use of presidential power. The White House has not stepped into an airline industry labor dispute, citing an adverse economic situation, since 1966.
With the pilots back on the job, a three-person Presidential Emergency Board named by Clinton will review the issues and propose a non-binding settlement within 30 days. If either side rejects the proposal, they will have another 30 days to reach a deal.
Should their bargaining problems linger, Congress theoretically could try to legislate a solution.
Although the actual shutdown lasted only minutes, American officials said the company may have lost as much as $100 million in canceled or shifted bookings. American’s president, Donald Carty, said the airline immediately would undertake sales promotions and other efforts to fill empty seats.
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If the strike, the first against American since 1958, had been allowed to continue, as many as 40,000 passengers would have been stranded daily and the economy would have suffered as much as $200 million in losses for each day of the walkout, federal officials estimated.
American was prepared to furlough without pay the majority of its nearly 90,000 employees.
While American officials said the two sides appeared to be close in the last minutes of their marathon bargaining in Washington, the pilots insisted that was not the case. While the airline’s leaders said the only sticking point with the union was “raw economics,” the pilots claimed all bargaining issues remained open.
While Carty was hopeful for a solution at the end of the cooling off period, saying help by “enough third parties” might bring a “reasonable settlement,” the pilots were clearly discouraged at the thought of yet more mediation.
“I’ve been in mediation half my life,” quipped Sovich.
The pilots, and most labor organizations, strongly oppose a Presidential Emergency Board because it robs them of the ability to exert their strike threat. Likewise, they say outside experts cannot easily untangle complex bargaining issues in such a short period.
White House officials said the president saw the need to intervene because of the economic impact of a strike, and the way long-distance and regional carriers have become linked as parts of a bigger air transport system.
Although American officials bemoaned the lack of a contract settlement, they clearly were happy that a costly and disruptive strike had been avoided during a heavily traveled weekend and peak travel time to Caribbean resorts.
Bruce Lindsey, the president’s liaison on the talks that had taken place this week between the pilots union and officials of American Airlines, said the president acted under a 60-year-old provision of the Railroad Labor Act designed to protect the economy against labor strikes.
Lindsey noted that the president decided to act after it became clear about 10:45 p.m. Chicago time Friday that the union had rejected the airline’s final offer.
White House officials said when Lindsey informed the president of the union’s decision, he told Clinton, “If you’re going to act, the time to do it is now.”
The president quietly took the executive order and signed it.
Lindsey later told reporters the White House had determined that if Clinton acted, he would do it before the strike disrupted air service. “We saw little benefit in people being disrupted,” he said.
Lindsey noted that the findings of a Department of Transportation study on the economic damage that would result from a strike provided him with the data needed to support presidential intervention.
In addition to the pilots, many of American’s other 80,000 employees also would have been left without a pay check. Among those would be many of the 12,000 employed by the carrier in the Chicago area.
American, a unit of AMR Corp. of Ft. Worth, began canceling flights two days ago in anticipation of a walkout. The carrier scrapped 250 international flights to Tokyo, South America and parts of Europe, as well as about 10 domestic routes.
The pilots union decided to strike after a week of intense, federally mediated negotiations failed to break a stalemate over pay and work-rule issues.
“Although we will continue to meet, we have no alternative other than to exercise our right to strike,” Jim Sovich, the pilots union president, told pilots in a teleconference as he called the stoppage just after 11 p.m. Chicago time.
But Sovich had hardly completed his statement when Clinton acted.
Airline industry experts were quick to praise the president for his action.
Airline traffic has grown so much in the last decade, any stop in service would have a major effect on the economy, they noted.
“The sheer number of passengers has increased so much in the past 10 to 15 years that intervention is a lot more critical,” said Joshua Javits, a Washington lawyer who served on the National Mediation Board from 1988 to 1993.
The pilots union said publicly it didn’t want the administration to intervene. AMR said it wanted an emergency board.
The political risk to Clinton, who won re-election with strong union support, may be minimal. The American pilots, who earn an average of $120,000 a year, are hardly blue-collar union members, unlike members of the Transportation Workers Union, which sought appointment of the emergency board.
The Transportation Workers, which represents mechanics and is a member of the AFL-CIO, has supported Clinton in the past.
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“Clinton isn’t losing votes by appointing an emergency board,” said Javits. “My bet? The pilots are mostly Republicans. If machinists were striking, he’d be weighing other options.”
One of the unresolved major disputes between the pilots and American is who would fly smaller jets on regional routes. The union wants its pilots to do the job and offered lower pay scales for those flights if the company accepted other demands.
But American parent AMR wants its American Eagle subsidiary, with lower-paid pilots from another union, to continue flying the commuter routes.
The other issue in dispute was pay hikes. The union is seeking 11 percent over 3 1/2 years. The airline’s latest offer called for 6 percent.