On a side note although not 9E itself the statement made by the MEC chair is absolutely brilliant and pretty much applies to our situation on the 9E side.




AP
Mesaba Pushes for Pay Cuts
Friday September 8, 4:37 pm ET
By Joshua Freed, AP Business Writer
Mesaba Says It May Cease Flying if Workers Don't Accept Pay Cuts


MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- Mesaba Airlines is losing $1 million per week and will soon have to choose between imposing pay cuts or shutting down unless its unions agree to concessions, the airline's president said in a newsletter.

The bankrupt feeder for Northwest Airlines Corp. already has permission from a bankruptcy judge to impose new terms on pilots, flight attendants, and mechanics. But they're threatening to strike if that happens.

"A strike would be as fatal as an orderly shutdown," Mesaba President John Spanjers wrote to 3,300 Mesaba employees in a newsletter obtained by The Associated Press on Friday, after the story was reported by the Star Tribune.

Mesaba has lined up a $24 million debtor-in-possession loan, but it said it can't access that money until it has new labor contracts in place. It has been demanding new contracts that would cut its costs by 19.4 percent.

The newsletter includes bar charts showing Mesaba's progress toward cost savings. There's no bar indicating progress on labor -- just a zero.

"You can look at numbers and charts and graphs until the cows come home, but the fact of the matter is that there's a market rate ... for pilots, flight attendants and mechanics, and we're going to be in that ballpark," said Tom Wychor, a Mesaba captain and head of its pilots union. "If they can't pay market rates, then they probably don't belong in business."

He said the unions are offering cuts of over 14 percent, which should be close enough to make a deal. But there have been no talks in over a month with the pilots, and it's been longer with the other two unions.

Mesaba claimed the delay is costing it in other ways, too. Northwest has been moving to outsource ground handling at its smaller airports, and Mesaba said it was awarded a bid to do that work at 17 airports, for $10 million a year. But Northwest is now re-bidding that work because of the uncertainty of Mesaba's future, Spanjers wrote.

Mesaba also said that Delta Air Lines Inc. has asked for bids on flying up to 143 regional jets, including on routes currently flown by Comair, Chautauqua, and other regional carriers. Mesaba plans to bid for that flying, "but realistically, we're at a tremendous disadvantage without labor savings in place," Spanjers wrote.

Mesaba Aviation Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection about a month after Northwest last fall. It is a unit of MAIR Holdings Inc.