Labor Squabble Causes Turbulence For Northwest Work Slowdown That Began Last Month Blamed For Canceled Flights, Other Problems

The blinking white “canceled” message on the flight status board was an unpleasant reminder.

The 6:05 p.m. flight on Northwest Airlines was canceled Tuesday, and Ronee Smith knew what that meant.

“Oh, I don’t even want to look,” said Smith, a bartender at Lefty’s Northern Trail Bar and Grill at Spokane International Airport.

Since Northwest’s work slowdown began in late April, security people, bartenders, and clerks at the airport have noticed an increasing frequency of delays, cancellations, and their byproducts - grouchy passengers.

“I’ve heard people say they’ll never fly Northwest again,” Smith said. “People have been really angry. You can just tell when they sit down.”

Some of the angriest were from the Val d’Orr Foreurs hockey team, whose debacle of delays in Chicago and Minneapolis delayed the opener of last week’s Memorial Cup hockey tournament nearly six hours.

Similar interruptions continued this week. On Monday, one flight from Minneapolis to Spokane was delayed first for four hours, then for another two hours for unexplained mechanical problems that took longer than normal to fix.

For the same announced reason - mechanical problems - a baggage flight on Monday was eight hours late, leaving more than 100 bags to be picked up or delivered on Tuesday. Later that day, a late afternoon flight from Minneapolis was canceled.

To those who have had to catch one of the three flights between Minneapolis and Spokane, getting an on-time flight lately has been sporadic at best - and making connections a challenge.

Delta and United have picked up some of the slack, but neither offers a nonstop flight between Spokane and Minneapolis.

The dispute is over labor practices between Northwest and its 25,000 mechanics and ground workers. Employees are under contract during the negotiations, and are legally prohibited from picketing, other than informational pickets. The company will not comment on whether talks are moving forward, and has intimated that talks of this type routinely take two years.

Comments differed from two company spokespeople. Spokesman Jim Faulkner in Minneapolis maintained that Northwest has not fallen below 72 percent in its on-time arrival, and that 95 percent of flights are being completed.

But spokeswoman Marta Locklin, also in Minneapolis, said later that the on-time arrivals for the carrier’s 1,700 daily flights have gone down, cancellations are up, and that the numbers provided were “pulled out of the air.” Since the slowdown in April, most company statements have acknowledged the added inconvenience.

The federal Department of Transportation’s latest airline service statistics only are through March, before the job action began. Even then, Northwest ranked eighth among the 10 leading airlines, with 72 percent of flights arriving within 15 minutes of schedule.

Despite that record, the International Airline Passenger Association, based in Dallas, said the slowdown has created surprisingly few passenger complaints so far. The consumer group has 120,000 members in North America, and routinely discusses complaints with the Department of Transportation. In the last month, there have been just five complaints regarding delays and cancellations, about average.

“It hasn’t been nearly as bad as was expected,” said Hal Salfen, IAPA director of consumer affairs. For comparison, the American Airlines pilots strike generated 100 complaints, Salfen said.

Formal complaints are not up, but the company has acknowledged it has a problem on Wall Street. Northwest’s stock on the Nasdaq closed at $48 per share Thursday, down from a high of $65.31 in March.

Ray Vecci, Northwest Executive Vice President for Customer Service, posted a formal apology for the slowdown on the company Web site, saying, “We know how hard it will be to win back your business and we will work hard to do so.”