‘Tis The Month Before Christmas And Fedex Pilots Aren’t Budging Union Threatens Work Slowdown During Holidays

For Federal Express, the timing couldn’t be worse.

The Christmas holidays are coming up, and millions of mail-order packages will need to be delivered. And Federal Express finds itself bickering with pilots over a contract.

The pilots, while not threatening to strike, are talking about work slowdowns that could hamper the company’s finely tuned system for time-sensitive, guaranteed deliveries.

The struggle, which actually has been going on since May 1994, is the first big fight for Federal Express over an employee work contract.

The contract talks stalled in October and a 30-day “cooling-off period” was ordered to prevent the company or the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) from launching strikes, lockouts or other such actions. That cooling-off period ends Saturday.

The two sides resumed talks Monday at the urging of the National Mediation Board. It’s not known whether any progress was made.

About half the company’s 2,800 pilots are members of the ALPA, which narrowly won certification at Federal Express in 1993.

FedEx spokesman Tom Martin said the company expects most of its pilots to continue working as usual no matter how the contract negotiations go.

“We believe the vast majority of our pilots are not going to take this labor dispute out on our customers,” he said. “They realize that reliability is the key to the company’s future.”

But David Webb, a FedEx pilot and union leader, said the company would be hard pressed to maintain its delivery schedules if pilots refuse to give the extra effort required of them during the busy holiday season.

“Between 350,000 and 400,000 packages per night during December either will or will not be flown by FedEx pilots volunteering to work extra on their days off,” Webb said.

The pilots can refuse such overtime and use various other methods to slow down the FedEx system, Webb said.

They might, for example, pay special attention to what ordinarily would be seen as routine maintenance checks, grounding planes longer than usual.

Pilots under federal rules are llowed a “withdraw of services” during a labor dispute. While that generally has applied to strikes, it would let a pilot take breaks of an hour or so at time, and those might correspond with scheduled takeoffs of his plane, Webb said.

Federal Express delivers nearly 2.4 million items each working day. On its busiest day during last year’s holiday season, the company shipped 3.4 million items.

On average, FedEx pilots now make $128,000 a year. That ranges from about $40,000 to $200,000, depending on a pilot’s rank and the kind of plane he or she flies.

The pilots say the company seeks concessions from them that would cost them $19 million to $40 million. FedEx wants to reduce vacation time, change work rules and cancel profit sharing, Webb said.

The pilots want pay raises totaling 17 percent over three years. The company has offered a 4 percent raise in the first year of a three-year contract, with no offer yet for the other two years.