Northwest gets applications from 1,400 pilots

Northwest Airlines said more than 1,400 pilots have applied for jobs since it began a hiring push July 24.

Northwest said on Wednesday that it plans to hire 250 to 350 new pilots in the next year. It has also recalled nearly 400 furloughed pilots. Those pilots need some training before they can begin flying again, but 230 of them were at the controls by Aug. 1, and 40 more will be flying by the end of the month, Northwest said.

Northwest canceled hundreds of flights at the end of June and July because it did not have enough pilots.

The Northwest branch of the Air Line Pilots Association has said that a tougher schedule adopted during bankruptcy has pushed pilots too hard. On Saturday they approved an agreement with the airline that will ease that schedule somewhat.

Northwest also cut its August schedule in an effort to avoid a repeat of problems from June and July.

Northwest emerged from bankruptcy on May 31.

•The Labor Department sued Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the nation’s largest poultry producer, to collect $3 million in back wages that federal officials said Wednesday are owed to more than 500 current and former workers.

Labor Department officials said Pilgrim’s Pride failed to pay overtime wages for the time workers spent putting on and taking off protective clothing.

They also said Pilgrim’s Pride hadn’t kept accurate overtime records since August 2005.

The Labor Department said the lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Dallas.

It charged that Pilgrim’s Pride violated a federal law requiring that workers get paid 150 percent of their regular wages for work beyond 40 hours a week.

A spokesman for Pilgrim’s Pride, Ray Atkinson, said the company’s pay practices have been upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

•To help the pharmaceutical industry combat drug counterfeiting, IBM is launching an electronic pedigree system today that tracks medications through the supply chain until they reach consumers.

The system employs radio-frequency identification, or RFID tags, which are already used to track packages of drugs, especially ones popular with counterfeiters. Pfizer, for example, uses RFID chips to track packs of its erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, and Purdue Pharma LP has been using them since 2004 to track its pain reliever OxyContin.