Delta, NWA pilots lay out ideas for merger
The arguments were laid out during closed-door arbitration hearings that began Thursday at a hotel near Los Angeles.
The media have been barred from the hearings, which will continue later this month and again next month. The Associated Press obtained transcripts of the sessions so far.
The two sides have been in a stalemate over how to integrate their seniority lists after Atlanta-based Delta acquires Eagan, Minn.-based Northwest later this year, though they have approved a joint collective bargaining agreement covering more than 12,000 pilots.
Pilots value their seniority. Those at the top of the list get first choice on vacations, the best routes and the bigger planes that they get paid more for flying.
Northwest pilots tend to be older than Delta pilots because many senior pilots retired from Delta during the run-up to the airline's 2005 bankruptcy filing.
An arbitration panel — California labor attorney Fredric Horowitz, attorney Dana Eischen and veteran arbitrator Richard Bloch — has been called in to resolve the seniority issue. A written decision, which would be binding, is due by Nov. 20.
For example, Freund said, there could be international wide-body captains and narrow-body first officers. He said that whatever the categories are, the appropriate process would be to then count the pilots in each status and category who held those positions on a particular date, on the respective seniority lists.
"That's the way its been done at Delta in every decade, the '70s, '80s, '90s and now the 2000s," Freund told the panel. "And every decade up until this decade, there has been seniority integration that has been done on status and category, and it's been done fundamentally successfully."
But Daniel M. Katz, an attorney for Northwest pilots, said that the only truly fair way to integrate the two lists so that pilots on each side understand they are where they belong is to do it based on the date they were hired. Katz said that method has been chosen by some prior arbitration panels.
"There is no justification for departing from that methodology to go to a status and category ratio that would create the very enmity and hostility that we've all avowed to avoid," Katz said.
The hearing sessions that started Thursday and ran to Sunday were to continue Oct. 20-24 in Washington and then return to Los Angeles from Nov. 15-17.
Delta's stock-swap deal to acquire Northwest, announced April 14, was given the go-ahead by shareholders of both companies on Sept. 25. It is still subject to regulatory approval. Delta is hoping to close the deal by the end of the year.
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