The unions won the suit, BUT, NWA is cannot legally pay back until they are in a positive cash-flow situation. In the meantime...all of the employees who held onto the stock continues to earn interest (also part of the deal with the give-back in the 90's). All the employees who still hold stock will make out like BANDITS when NWA is finally able to pay up.

It seems as if NWA has figured out exactly how much they need to get back from each labor group in order to survive (or at least compete with United), and will not budge from that spot.

:rolleyes:

You had me, right up to that point where you decided that all the other reports of significant and multiple delays lately didn't matter and the entire world consisted of just this thread.

I hate to say it, but anyone who thinks that NW is, systemwide, delivering right now, is taking an verly optimistic viewpoint.

And in the end, all it does it drive away business.

Steve

ROTFL (Rolling on the floor laughing)...
 

Great feedback! ^ Please keep it coming! :)

I have been trying to relate my recent career challenges to those now being experienced by NW mechanics. I wanted to establish my empathy for them, given that a position that I held for almost 6 years was slated to be shipped off to India in the fall of 2003. There was little or nothing I could do about that, but I could (and did) take proactive measures to manage my own career.

I think the NW mechanics should do the same. They should knock off all of the flight delay strong arming tactics and make sure that their skills are good enough to be retained by NW to do the work, or to perhaps help manage the new vendors in Singapore and other areas who will be taking over most of the major engine repair work. That would be a sign that they recognize the world has changed around them and they elected to take the high road.

-Alan

What's In A Reputation?
 

I believe that many PAX out there just go for the cheapest fair. But there are many who also remember their experiences from the past, and factor this into their decision on who to fly. I have more than one friend who fly markets where NW is a choice, but not an exclusive. I have had to take on the role of NW Champion with these friends to encourage them to give NW their business. Why? They had a bad experience from the mid to late 90's during key moments during NW's history -- such as 7 years ago during the pilot's strike. I too had my issues with NW during the late 1990's, especially with the baggage handlers at MSP and the FA's. But things have improved. I know it because I fly often. Some of my friends (who have not flown NW since the late 1990's) still hold NW in contempt for their bad experiences during the same time. I think NW mechanics (and collaborating pilots) are helping to put the NW reputation right back were it started from at the end of the 1990's. :rolleyes:

-Alan

Hey guys...

From my experiences as an airline employee, I can all but guarantee you that the other labor groups are doing nothing more than paying lip service in support of the mechanics. If NW goes belly up as the result of a strike by the mechs, EVERYBODY will be looking for another job... at the bottom of somebody else's pay scale, and probably at a regional carrier (i.e., mesaba/pinnacle/comair/etc). For EVERYBODY this will mean drastic wage cuts. The rampers will be lucky to see $10/hr, the mechs $12/hr, the pilots $22/hr, FA's at $18/hr (the last two only "work" 1000 hours in a year, so that wage translates to $22,000 and $18,000 annually). Working as an express employee, my job was at the whim of way too many labor groups. ANYBODY at UAL, *AND* anybody at my own company. Basically those other guys wanted what they wanted, and would I support them in the event of a job action? ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, NOT. If my airline failed to operate for a day, I WOULD NOT BE PAID and the THEIR UNION WOULD DO NOTHING TO HELP ME. I was non-union, so there was never any chance of "we got your back later."

Pilots and FA's WANT to stay on schedule. They do not get paid an hourly wage and overtime like many employees do. With some exceptions, if they get back to their base late, that is time that comes out of their pocket, so to speak. Time not spent with family, or, if they commute, possibly missing their last flight to their real home.

:D ^

FYI I believe personal attacks are against the TOS here....and I view this as a personal attack......it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree you should be respectful

BTW: I notice you have only 11 posts, welcome but please reread the TOS you agreed to inorder to post

i have been flying almost every week and without exception, have been delayed on every trip. plus the last three times i have lost my luggage.

i wasn't really upset until this weekend tho'. i was flying my wife in to PDX from SBN on a surprise date in portland. i was on a business trip and thought it would be cool to bring her out. on the way out i was delayed for hourse because of mechanical issues and then a storm.

of course, on the way out her plane experienced "mechanical" delays for several hours which they later changed to "weather." so instead of getting in 11ish i picked her up at 1:40am. :mad: delays don't really hurt me because my company will pay for a hotel, meals, worldclub, etc. however, she was stuck sitting in msp for hours. that pissed me off.

however, when i flew back yesterday and they busted my suitcase the AZO agent told me that because it was a strap, they really couldn't do anything....but he gave me a $50 voucher because i probably have been inconvenienced lately and appreciated my business. ^

Mods, could we please get a little editing of this thread. What started as a great conversation...

This Is Good
 

This is good! ^ :) I hope that you speak for the majority of mechanics and pilots. I travel a lot to Vancouver, B.C. to visit my brother-in-law in Abbotsford. I have heard a lot of talk on 1130 AM about the Telus line workers (I think that is the local phone company up there) strike. There have been numerous incidents of sabotage of phone lines, along with their customer care call center getting flooded at strategic times with frivolous calls. This makes me nervous as a frequent NW PAX. I don't think the strong arming tactic really works, and I hope that NW mechanics realize this. It will only backfire on them and, potentially, the rest of the employees of NW. It will also impact customers -- especially in markets where NW is the only player or major carrier, such as MSP.

-Alan

Planes, Trains & Automobiles
 

Sorry to correct you, but my personal website (registered for flyertalk) actually goes to the Internet Movie Database entry for the movie, "Planes, Trains & Automobiles"... which is how I feel sometimes being a frequent business traveler. I recommend to anyone who travels a lot to rent this movie... it is a scream. :D

Thank you. :) Did you check out the video clips of my interviews with Cybill Shepherd and Gloria Allred when I was a featured guest on the talk show "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"? Too bad they cancelled the show.

-Alan (a.k.a. "Neal Page")

Well, one of the historic values of unions were to guarantee a certain quality. Look at the ads in major cities for the plumbers/electrician unions...while the labor may be more $$, work should meet a certain standard. While many unions no longer have a period of apprentaceship (spelling??) to guarantee a quality product, some do.

I assume that making sure "their skills are good enough to be retained by NW to do the work" is moot. I would hope that every mechanic at NW has skills good enough to do the work, and has been for as long as they have been working. Higher skills will not keep any of them around any longer than someone who meets the minimum required to be satisfactory. Furloughs are by senority, as their is no "objective fair" way to evaluate all the mechanics systemwide against each other. If the NW mechanics do as they are told, they wil llose 53% of membership and the remaining 47% will have 25% less at the end of the day. If you look on the senority list, and see that you have the median seniority, you are gone, period. Working harder, faster, better will only get you furloughed on the same day as working "safe" slow, and defering nothing.

When faced with a no-win ultimatium, sometime you must think along a different path. Anyone ever watch Star Trek 2, The Wrath of Khan? It is the Kobishaimaroo test. Only way Kirk passed the computer simulation that had no solution was to cheat, think outside the box, and reprogram the computer. NW has given the majority of mechanics the same test....a no win situation. If taking a time out, and forcing a changing of the rules seems like their only option, why shouldn't they do it? If you had 20 years in a job with little chance of an income anywhere near what your lifestyle requires, and then only after uprooting your family to go elsewhere, I would hope that you tried everything in your power to try to get your employeer to change their mind. You owe it to your family, so do they. The most dangerous dog/cat/rat in the world is one whose back is against the wall, and the no sutible options are presented....that's when the fight comes out.

In a democratic system (as a union vote is) I cannot ever recall where a group voted in majority to eliminate a majority. It would take every single person whose job was to be saved, and some of the people whose jobs were to be eliminated to do this, and who is going to vote themself out of a job?

fastair,

I can only assume by your name that you work for united or some other airline.

Having worked without union representation for an airline, I cannot say that the non-union "merit" system was any better than a union seniority system wrt promotions. Management, quite simply, promoted people based on who they "liked" and not based on how well they performed their job. Which reminds me, as a ramp agent, exactly what objective criteria should we use to determine merit? The same question goes for pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and gate agents. Again, I ask, what system of meirt should we use to determine who gets promoted or layed off first? I submit that there is no system that is obviously better than the seniority system.

Dhast,
That was one of my points. The poster I quoted made reference to the incorrect fact that if they worked hard and good, that they would protect their jobs. This is untrue. I used to work for UA when customer contact wsa non-union, and I worked for them after it was union. A few bad apples got lazier with the union, but in time, they were terminated. Favoritism did go way down after they went union though, which to me, was a net good. An employee knew what to expect if he screwed up, instead of arbitrary decisions that varried from one supervisor to another.

The senority system has its faults...it does not recognize "above average" performers and reward them, but after all, what kind of a promotion would you give a mechanic? You make them a lead, then what? end of line. SUre they could be a supe, but that is not done by seniority. Until an equitable system that is applied uniformly can be divised to evaluate thousands of employyes work skills/ethics across hundreds of stations, senority works for me. FOr those who say that you can hide behind the senority system and goof off...you could hide behind a merit system and goof off to, provided you never got cought or wer friends with the supe. The bad apples will get thrown out in a union system too, but at lest they have someone making sure they do not get railroaded, they can appeal, and can comapre their case to other cases with precidents set.

Union or not, NW would try given todays economic conditions to do the same thing. The only difference is with the union representation, the AMFA folks got to vote on their course of action to accept NW proposal instead of having it handed to them with no choice. To me, a choice is always better than no choice.

Railway Act
 

Does anyone know how the Railway Act factors into a potential NW Mechanics strike, as well as the union's ability to effect a work slowdown? I have heard from a friend of mine who is a mechanic for UA that this act enables mechanics to do both. I tried doing a google search for more informaiton, but I came up empty..

Thanks!

-Alan

Bingo – most flyers base their airline on price. The reason NWA and other airlines are in this situation is because price is most important. More then comfort and I am beginning to believe based on some comments here, safety. Airlines that try to compete on service (TWA, PAN-AM, and Concorde) are long gone.

Shortsighted capitalism wins out again.

I prefer Airport (the movie).

All the "t"s are crossed and "i"s dotted as far as a legal strike per the railway labor act...
1) An empasse was declared.
2) A vote was taken.
3) 30 day cooling off period.
4) no presidential intervention.

Not 100% sure, but I do not believe that a "slowdown" is anything legal. To "work safe" is always reccomended. Driving on the ramp at a safe walking speed would hammer any hub operation into inability to operate on schedule. Gates may fill up with inbound aircraft waiting for gates to deplane.

SLowdowns while (I believe) are not legal, are very difficult to prove. Didn't AA try to prove that its pilots were ingaged in illegal work stoppages, and they lost in court?

Update
 

I agree with what you've said. But although the mechanics have a choice regarding accepting a NW proposal, that choice becomes moot since US labor laws don't do a very good job of protecting US labor: if NW can find enough mechanics who will cross the picket lines and enough Americans to fly on an airline that is striking, the mechanics' choice is irrelevant. (Beyond labor laws, safety laws go unenforced: there are many well documented instances of corporations repeatedly violating serious safety regulations, to the point of deaths resulting, yet still little happens to the corporation; see Bill Moyers's Trade Secrets to see this in chemical plants http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/transcript.html)

US labor is in a race to the bottom: so many people say "why should I support X workers? their situation is no worse than mine" when in fact, people should be saying "If working conditions/pay/benefits get cut back for enough groups, MINE will eventually be as well."

Sweatshop conditions and sweatshop pay is the legacy we're going to leave for our children/grandchildren, if we don't change our way of thinking and our labor laws. Corporations spend a fortune (much more than even 10 years ago) lobbying Washington. This isn't to benefit you, the worker, or us, the society; it is to benefit a very small percent of Americans (who are major shareholders in those corporations) who are extremely wealthy.
=====
... data published in a Twentieth Century Fund Report suggests a disturbing answer. The sharp increase in inequality since the late 1970s has made the distribution of wealth in this country more unequal than in what used to be perceived as the class-ridden societies of northwest Europe. Today the United States is the most unequal of any industrialized country in terms of income and, more importantly, wealth. And the situation is worsening more rapidly here with each passing year.

Indeed, the only other period in this century when household wealth was so disproportionately held by a relative handful of the richest Americans came between 1922 and 1929. During that time, inequality was buoyed primarily by the excessive increase in stock values, which eventually crashed and led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Twentieth Century Fund Report, Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America, is written by Edward N. Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University. Among its major findings is that the gap in wealth is even greater than the widely reported gap in income among Americans.
INCOME & WEALTH:
from a 2003 article: The top 20 percent owns over 80 percent of all wealth. In 1998, it owned 83 percent of all wealth. http://www.inequality.org/wolffint2.html

If you go back to 1979, prior to the period when the growth in inequality really took off in the United States, the top 5 percent on average had 11 times the average income of the bottom 20 percent. If you fast forward to the year 2000, the most recent economic peak, you find that that ratio increased to 19 times. So over the course of those two decades, the gap between the wealthiest and the lowest income families grew from 11 times to 19 times.... The idea is that a janitor in 1965 was paid a lot more than a janitor in 2000, despite the fact that that person was at least as productive and as well educated in 2000 as he or she was in 1965. http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm20...bernstein.html

on the other hand, more Americans own stock than ever more, so more Americans than ever before are "benefitting" from corporate cost-cutting. similarly, although Wal-Mart -type stores do not help American workers, they do greatly aid American consumers, and there are more American consumers than workers.

Which is not to excuse American corporate behavior. I want to echo what NWAOldtimer said. Che Guevara!

Guess they didn't get the message ....
 

According to an article in yesterday's San Francisco (right in the heart of Lalaland) Chronicle, 11,000 people have applied for 400 jobs at a new WalMart in Oakland, CA.

So in Oakland there are 27X as many people willing & wanting to work at a Walmart as are needed, and tens of thousand more who will benefit from the low prices. Sounds like a good deal to me!

Owning stock does not equal a benfit. The major index(s) are lower than what there were was at the turn of the century, which means $$ lost as a stock owner (on average.) This does not count if you received any dividends, but most likely most portfolios would have earned more $$ in a bank, or even in your pocket. Ownership in loseing company/fund=money gone forever.

I think that the above comment reeks at best of naiveté and at worst of duplicity for the sake of making a rather extreme argument. Try visiting a real sweatshop sometime to give yourself some perspective. It is a term far too often bandied about to characterize any workplace that entails manual labor and what some consider to be low or unfair pay when in reality it should only be applied to places where true abuse of workers takes place.

I don't disagree one bit that the income gap is widening and a lot of self-serving BS is spurning this trend forward to an uneccessary extent. I don't think that discouraging entrepreneurialism or capitalism is the solution however depite my own social and fiscal liberalism.

I especially don't think that broad discussion of the US income gap is relevant in this thread since it unnecessarily broadens the scope of the discussion to a point where it gets off-track and completely dilutes relevant information about NW.

peace,
~Ben~

Baloney.

For starters, most portfolios receive dividends, so you've pretty much discounted your analysis from the top as not applying to most investors.

Average return from U.S. stock market 1926 - 1999: 11%

You'll never beat that at a bank.

If by "turn of the century" you mean 2000, you're too shortsighted. Anyone who is investing for only 5 years stands a good chance of losing.

NW Strike? Yes or No?
 

Just a simple yes or no required. Cast your vote with one word! Let's see what FT members think...

Yes. Why? Because NWA apparently thinks so. An hour ago someone I know just got a call from NWA telling them that their flight had been cancelled and they'd been re-booked on AA.

sure there will be a strike. And they will be at the picket lines for a while. Hope they (both the Mechanics and the FA's if they join) have a big strike fund.

(Yes)

Yes..

..no..

Yes..

(yes)

Strike?
 

Yes--

*yes*

Yes....

Yes, and unfortunately I have a Sunday morning flight scheduled. :eek:

Yes...

Without question
 

Yes. Unfortunately I have a Monday AM flight from MSP-JAN

YES.. and no one will win in the end