Labor contract negotiations in the airline industry: airline labor negotiations take 1.3 years, on average, to conclude, and about half go into Federal mediation; much of the variance in the duration of negotiations can be attributed to which particular airlines and unions are bargaining, not to economic conditions

Monthly Labor Review,  July, 2003  by Andrew von Nordenflycht,  Thomas A. Kochan

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In other words, once a contract becomes amendable, the parties are legally barred from self-help until the National Mediation Board releases them and the cooling-off periods expire. Theoretically, the parties could be prevented from self-help indefinitely, because the decision to release them while in mediation is at the discretion of the Board. Once the Board releases the parties, it is still a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of 90 days (the time from the beginning of the first cooling-off period, through the period during which the Presidential Emergency Board deliberates, to the end of the second cooling-off period) before the parties can strike or impose a lockout. It is generally recognized that, since deregulation, both Presidential Emergency Boards and strikes have become relatively rare. However, providing data on the actual frequency of each step--mediation, arbitration, releases, Presidential Emergency Board deliberations, and strikes or lockouts--is one of the contributions of this article.

Data and methods

Sample. The data on the duration of negotiations and the resolution process are drawn from the Review of Collective Bargaining, a bulletin produced by the Airline Industrial Relations Conference (AIRCON). AIRCON is a nonprofit airline industry association that collects and distributes information on airline labor contracts and negotiations for its member carriers. Since 1984, AIRCON has periodically published the Review of Collective Bargaining, which updates the status of labor negotiations at member carriers. In addition to searching the AIRCON archives, archival searches of major newspapers (through Lexis/Nexis and Dow Jones Interactive) were used to fill in missing data points (for example, ratification dates) wherever possible.

The sample used in this article covers U.S. carriers that were members of AIRCON and includes contracts ratified between January 1, 1984, and December 20, 2002 (so that the sample includes contracts that became amendable as early as 1982, thus covering negotiating activity from 1982 to 2002). The sample was limited to contracts covering pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, fleet service personnel (when noted separately from mechanics), and clerical/agent personnel. Contracts for dispatchers and those in other miscellaneous occupations with relatively small employee bases were excluded. Next, contracts for which either an amendable date (for the previous contract) or a ratification date could not be identified also were excluded from the sample. This left 265 contracts. Finally, for most of the analyses that follow, initial contracts and midterm negotiations (as described shortly) were excluded. In the end, the core sample consisted of 199 contracts across 39 airlines and 17 unions.