By Julie Johnsson | Pilots of Spirit Airlines are due to walk off the job at midnight if
last-ditch negotiations fail to produce an agreement with the
controversial discount carrier.
Florida-based Spirit has canceled much of its weekend flight schedule in
anticipation of a strike by its 500 pilots though talks continued
Friday. “We are contacting customers whose flights are affected,” said
Spirit spokeswoman Misty Pinson.
A strike would disrupt travel for thousands of Spirit passengers this weekend, including those in Chicago who had intended to travel on the five flights per day that Spirit flies from O’Hare International Airport to Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Fort Myers and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Though Spirit is a minor player, known best for its cheeky advertising and super-low fares, its labor strife is being closely watched by the rest of the airline industry. Pilots from more than a dozen airlines joined Spirit picket lines in Detroit, Atlantic City and Fort Lauderdale, Friday.
Unions representing the vast majority of U.S. airline workers are in contract talks, seeing to regain pay that they surrendered during bankruptcies that swept the industry last decade.
Spirit pilots are paid 20 percent to 40 percent less than peers at competitors such as JetBlue Airways and AirTran Airways, according to union leaders, and are seeking to bridge that gap through contract talks that have been under way for about four years.
With the 12:01 a.m. strike deadline looming, the two sides were making progress Friday afternoon, though serious differences remained on issues of compensation and work rules, said Andy Nelson, vice-chairman of Spirit’s Master Executive Council of the Air Line Pilots Association.
“We’re still trying to get an agreement,” Nelson told the Tribune. “But we have a lot remaining to do and not a lot of time to do it in.”
The negotiations, conducted in Washington under the auspices of the National Mediation Board, could serve as an early gauge of whether the Obama Administration, elected with strong labor support, will act to quell labor strife.
It typically takes years for unions and management to draw up new collective bargaining agreements under the arcane procedures established by the Railway Labor Act, which governs the airline industry.
Workers can’t walk off the job until talks are declared by the mediation board to be at an impasse and a 30-day-cooling off period expires. Even then the president can order workers to stay on the job until an agreement is reached, a prospect considered unlikely for Spirit.
Based in Miramar, Fla., and patterned after Irish discounter Ryanair, Spirit has about 150 flights per day from the Eastern U.S. to the Caribbean and Latin America. It has made headlines in the last year for advertising tweaking Tiger Woods for his marital woes and for announcing plans to charge passengers up to $45 for carry-on bags.
