Aviation Safety

Create a timeline of the annual activity of labor/management collective bargaining from 1978 through 2009, providing a short synopsis of mergers, new carriers and company departure from the air transportation sector. Highlight the areas of most importance.

1978 Jan, The Federal Hourly Minimum Wage was set at $2.65 an hour.

1978, Mar 6, Pres. Carter invoked the Taft-Hartley Act for an 80-day cooling off period in a coal strike. Miners had struck 3 months earlier after coal companies demanded wage and benefit cuts and refused to be forced back to work. They ended the strike after 110 days when most company demands were dropped.

1978, Pres. Carter invoked the Taft-Hartley Act for an 80-day cooling off period in a coal strike. Miners had struck 3 months earlier after coal companies demanded wage and benefit cuts and refused to be forced back to work. They ended the strike after 110 days when most company demands were dropped.

1981, Aug 3, U.S. air traffic controllers (PATCO) went on strike, despite a warning from President Reagan they would be fired. Most of the 13,000 controllers defied Reagan’s order to return to work within 48 hours and were fired. 1981, Aug 5, Pres. Reagan began firing 11,500 air traffic controllers who had gone out on strike 2 days earlier.

1981, Oct 22, The US Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization was decertified by the federal government for its strike the previous August.

1989, Mar 3, Machinists struck Eastern Airlines and pilots honored the picket lines.

1989, Mar 4, Eastern Airlines machinists went on strike and were joined by pilots and flight attendants.

1989, Mar 5, Machinists striking Eastern Airlines withdrew an immediate threat to picket the nation’s railroads, after a federal judge issued an order temporarily prohibiting rail workers from honouring the Eastern picket lines.

1989, Nov 23, Pilots Union gave up on a sympathy strike against Eastern Airlines.

1998, Aug 28, Over 6,000 pilots of Northwest Airlines went on strike.

1998, Aug 29, Northwest Airlines pilots went on strike after their union rejected a last-minute company offer.

1998, Sep 1, Pilots for Air Canada went on strike for the first time in the association’s 61 year history.

1998, Sep 2, Pilots for Air Canada began a strike, the first in the carrier’s history.

1998, Sep 12, Leaders of striking pilots at Northwest Airlines ratified a new contract, ending a walkout that began August 28. 1999, Feb 13, A federal judge held American Airlines’ pilots’ union and two top board members in contempt and promised sizable fines against them, saying the union did not do enough to encourage pilots to return to work after a court order. A federal judge fined the American Airlines pilot’s union at least $10 million for ignoring his back-to-work order.

2000, Aug 26, United Airlines signed a tentative accord with its 10,000 pilots following 20 months of negotiations.

2003, Jan 9, The Bush administration said federal airport security screeners will not be allowed to unionize so as not to complicate the war on terrorism.

2004, Nov 1, Casino workers in Atlantic City tentatively accepted a new 5-year contract.
2004, Nov 11, Delta Air Line pilots accepted over $1 billion in annual pay cuts and agreed to forgo raises through
2005, Apr 22, The US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. agreed to take over the underfunded pension plans of United Airlines and assume some $6.6 billion in liabilities.

2005, May 10, A federal bankruptcy judge freed United Airlines from responsibility for pensions covering 120,000 employees (History). Write a short answer essay identifying the four basic stages that the air transport sector has gone through in the deregulation era. Each of the four stages has had a different type of impact on the labor unions; accordingly, in one sentence for each stage describe the particular impact of that stage. The Air Transport sector has gone through four basic stages in the deregulation era: expansion, consolidation, concentration, and globalisation. In the expansion phase several “new entrant” airlines were added to the US system.

Since most of the airlines were non-union carriers, they were able to operate at a lower per unit cost that forced the other carriers to reduce their comparative prices so as to match the prices of the non-union carriers. This helped in increasing competition and reduction in costs. During the consolidation phase, airlines moved to improve their balance sheets so as to reduce the threats of their competition, acquisitions, and mergers became the norm. In 1986, 25 airlines were involved in some form of consolidation movement. Union membership either remained constant or decreased depending on the union membership status of the surviving carrier.

From the beginning of the consolidation phase in late 1985 until 1990, the number of employees in the Airline industry was increased by almost 43%. This unprecedented concentration has resulted in the increase of non-union employee classification and the ranks of the airline unions holding the contracts with the growing and surviving carriers. Finally in the Globalisation phase, the airlines and the airline industry was provided a further opportunity to increase their numbers. The international travel has grown at a faster pace, as compared to the domestic traffic (Kaps, 1997).

References
History, T. o. (n.d.). Timelines of History. Retrieved from http://www.timelines.ws/ Kaps, R. W. (1997). The View Of The Unions. In R.
W. Kaps, Air Transport Labor Relations (pp. 239-241). SIU Press.