Saying that some progress was being made, negotiators for US Airways and its flight attendants kept talking past the 11:01 p.m. deadline Friday in hopes of reaching a settlement and avoiding a shutdown of the nation’s sixth-largest airline.
“There’s been a little progress,” said Jeff Zack, a spokesman for the flight attendants. “Both sides have agreed to keep talking.”
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney increased pressure on the airline when he said in a statement that the demand of US Airways for concessions from flight attendants was “not only unacceptable, it is absolutely unconscionable.” He said the labor federation was ready to add millions of dollars to the meager flight-attendant strike fund if the airline refused to alter its position.
More Top Picks Muffin Pan
In the background was the possibility that President Clinton could order the company and flight attendants to keep working while an emergency board investigates and makes recommendations for a settlement. Creation of a board would put a 60-day hold on the labor dispute. Three years ago, Clinton stepped in within minutes of the start of a strike by American Airlines pilots. But a year later he allowed pilots of Northwest Airlines to shut down that carrier for 15 days.
Marathon talks went on all day Friday at the offices of the National Mediation Board in Washington.
The airline had said it would shut down rather than try to operate while flight attendants disrupt schedules by striking random flights. It notified its more than 30,000 employees to report to work Saturday expecting to help passengers rebook on other carriers.
Most of the airline’s operations are concentrated in the Northeast, particularly in the Washington, New York and Boston corridor. The airline, the nation’s 6th largest, controls about one-third of the market in that area.
In the Midwest, Chicago is the western edge of most of the airline’s operations. The carrier operates 22 flights daily from O’Hare International Airport to its three hubs in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Charlotte.
Metrojet, the discount operation of US Airways, has nine flights daily from Midway Airport to Baltimore and Washington.
The only indication of how the talks were going was a letter discussing a revised airline offer that was circulated among employees Thursday.
The letter said the airline was willing to negotiate the salary formula it had previously said was non-negotiable. Under the original proposal, the airline had offered to pay flight attendants the average pay of four competitors plus 1 percent.
Cynthia Kain, a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants that represents the 10,000 US Airways attendants, said the offer amounts to a 5 percent pay cut.
“We haven’t had a raise in over four years and we’d like one,” said Patricia Friend, international president of the flight attendants union. “In 1993, when we negotiated our last contract . . . we agreed to cuts in our wages to help the airline.
“Now the airline is profitable again and we want our fair share,” said Friend, noting that the union last struck an airline in 1993. That strike was against Alaska Airlines.
The US Airways flight attendants’ desire to get a raise is shared at many other carriers. Every major U.S. airline is negotiating a new contract this year with one or more of its unions.
The same year Alaska Airlines flight attendants struck, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, the house union that represents American Airlines flight attendants, struck American in a work stoppage that ended only after President Clinton persuaded the two sides to agree to binding arbitration. Two years later, the flight attendants got a 17 percent retroactive raise spread over six years.