ALEXANDRIA, Va. – US Airways Group Inc. will seek a court injunction to prohibit a strike by unions that have threatened a walkout if a bankruptcy judge grants the airline’s request to cancel their labor contracts.
A bankruptcy court hearing began Thursday on the airline’s request to cancel its collective bargaining agreements with its machinists, flight attendants, reservation agents and gate workers.
The airline is seeking to impose pay cuts of 25 percent or more on some worker groups, and also wants to cut benefits for current employees and retirees to save an estimated $1 billion a year. It also wants to terminate its remaining pension plans, which provide benefits to flight attendants and machinists.
If the airline does not get the relief it is seeking, it will be forced to begin liquidation proceedings in mid-January, said Brian Leitch, the airline’s lawyer.
“It’s likely, almost to the point of certainty, that sometime in the middle of January the airline will have to begin the orderly process of liquidation” unless the unions reach a negotiated agreement or the judge imposes new contract terms, Leitch told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stephen Mitchell.
The Communications Workers of America, which represents reservation and gate agents, and the Association of Flight Attendants have threatened to strike if their contracts are canceled.
Airline managers have insisted that the unions do not have the right to strike under federal labor law, and Chris Chiames, an airline vice president, said Thursday that the airline would seek a declaratory injunction from Mitchell to clarify the issue and prevent the unions from striking if he cancels their labor contracts.
Chiames said the airline would file the motion as soon as this weekend and seek a hearing on the issue Dec. 16.
The airline has been concerned that talk of a strike will send travelers to other airlines .
“The debtors (US Airways) marvel at the self-destructive impulse that leads to the public expression of such a threat,” Leitch wrote in a court motion Tuesday that first outlined the airline’s plan to seek an injunction. “If a strike were to occur, the debtors would almost certainly be doomed from the first moment of a walkout.”
But some union leaders have said a strike threat provides the unions with their only real negotiating power in a process in which management is seeking in some cases to reduce pay scales to 1989 levels and in which the bankruptcy judge can impose the cuts unilaterally. Mitchell has already imposed temporary pay cuts of 21 percent on the unions.
Teddy Xidas, president-elect of the US Airways unit of the flight attendants union, said the threat of a strike is “real and … in my own opinion, it has helped negotiations.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
