One Mechanic's
Journey to Aid
Northwest Air
By JANET ADAMY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 26, 2005; Page B1
MINNEAPOLIS -- Jim Jones showed up here two weeks ago in an unreliable van carrying a toaster, a computer, a stack of CDs and heavy brown work boots. Now he's repairing jets for Northwest Airlines, filling in for striking mechanics. Atop his head sits a worn black NWA baseball cap, his souvenir from years spent fixing the company's DC-9s and DC-10s as a contract worker.
Among the replacement crew, "there are more than a few people here who have been basically working for Northwest already," says Mr. Jones, a husky 50-year-old with a gray beard and a Southern drawl. "The replacement mechanics, I'm sorry to say, are just as good."
Mr. Jones's path to Northwest offers a glimpse at why the airline's striking mechanics have considerably less clout that in years past to extract a better contract from the nation's fourth-largest carrier. Years of laying off workers and paring flights after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have created a vast group of skilled replacement workers, which the airline has tapped to keep its planes running during a potentially crippling strike. (Related article1)
Northwest officials have said they had no trouble lining up a cadre of 1,200 replacement mechanics, who the carrier claims have an average of 14 years' experience working on planes, many of the type Northwest operates, and are all federally licensed. Northwest is paying the replacements $26.53 an hour, slightly less than the $27.17 scale in its final offer to the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association union. Before the strike, top pay for an experienced AMFA mechanic with a federal "airframe and powerplant" license was $36.39, yielding annual pay of more than $70,000, near the top in the industry.
Andy Roberts, Northwest's executive vice president of operations and architect of the strike-contingency plan, said last weekend that "at some point" the airline will take applications from the temporary staffers to fill the jobs permanently. "I'm sure many of these guys would be interested," he said. If the strike is settled, the mechanics who had walked out would have the right to return, but only if there were positions available.
An aircraft mechanic since 1981, Mr. Jones has considerable experience. Growing up in Dallas, he lingered at the airport just to watch the planes fly in. He learned about the basics of engines, albeit automotive ones, while tinkering with a 1954 Ford Fairlane he bought for $50.
He joined the military after high school and worked as a guard at a naval base in Illinois. He studied horse production at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, and planned to help his grandfather raise horses. "I finally realized I was spending more of my time in the parking lot fixing people's cars," he says. So he scraped together $5,000 and signed up for aircraft-maintenance classes in San Antonio.
Mr. Jones studied electrical theory, mechanics fundamentals, psychology and other topics. After 100 credit hours, he earned his associate degree in applied science. By 1981, he was working as a general aviation mechanic at a small county airport in Texas.
He dreamed of getting a job as a mechanic for a major carrier, but was reluctant to join a union. Instead, he spent most of the next two decades working as an aircraft maintenance contractor.
Often, he was doing the same type of work as the carrier's on-staff mechanics, he says. As recently as this spring, he helped overhaul planes while working for a vendor that had Northwest as a customer. Among other tasks, he helped strip down the aircraft frame, check for corrosion and repair worn-out parts.
Since the job paid $18 an hour and offered no stability, he kept his eyes open. He left earlier this year. Bills started to pile up. His wife needed a new car, so he bought her a 1999 Dodge Stratus. Then the engine blew out on his van.
So last month, Mr. Jones drove to Tuscon, Ariz., for a six-week training course run by Northwest that would prepare him to be a replacement mechanic in the event of a Northwest strike. The pay during a strike is about $30 an hour, which includes a stipend for his expenses, along with a discount on airline tickets. He and 28 other replacement trainees spent afternoons in a hotel conference room, where they pored over a dozen books on airline maintenance. Twice a week they were fed a hot lunch, the other days a sandwich, he says.
Mr. Jones left with a three-by-two-foot box of training materials. But most of what they taught him he already knew from previous experience, he says. "It's the same thing that people have been doing all their careers," he says.
Two weeks ago he got in his van and headed for Minneapolis, bringing with him a worn blue folder filled with maintenance certificates to prove his credentials. He set himself up in a room at a Holiday Inn, though he didn't know whether the strike would actually take place and so whether he'd actually be called to work. When TV reports said last Friday that Northwest's mechanics were set to strike, he headed to the Cub Foods supermarket to buy bread, lunch meat, lettuce and mayonnaise so he could make sandwiches to take to work.
Now Mr. Jones gets up at 4 a.m., makes a slice of toast, slips on his blue uniform and boards a yellow school bus before sunrise. In the darkness, strikers hurl insults as the bus pulls away from the hotel. Replacement workers sit in silence during the ride to work, he says.
The biggest challenge isn't the maintenance work itself, Mr. Jones says, but completing the paperwork necessary to record repairs and navigating the company's computer system. He says this is less of a challenge for him than for some other replacement mechanics because he used the same system during his old contract job fixing Northwest aircraft.
On Tuesday, he and four other workers had to replace the brakes on a plane. Workers had to ask "where do we get the jack, where do we get the tools," he says. "It wasn't, 'How do we get the job done?' "
"There's a vast pool of qualified mechanics, more so than 10 years ago," he says.
Mr. Jones says he wishes the workers hadn't gone on strike. He would have been happy enough to have earned some extra money during training without having to endure the heckling of the picketers. (Despite his aversion to unions, he joined the International Association of Machinists, a competitor to the union striking Northwest, three years ago and remains a member.)
Mr. Jones says he understands why the striking workers are angry at him. "We are taking their big stick away from them," he says. |
