Here is today's Star Tribune article:
"Pilots union leaders and negotiators from Northwest Airlines will gather in a New York courtroom today with no deal in hand, but the prospects for an agreement have improved.
"We could get a deal fairly quickly," Mark McClain, chairman of the Northwest pilots union, said in an interview Thursday. "We're closer now than we were last week."
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Allan Gropper had set today as the deadline for Northwest to reach new contracts with its pilots and flight attendants unions.
The pilots and management both reported this week that they have made substantial progress on preserving pilot jobs, and that could prompt Gropper to give the parties a second extension to complete a deal.
That action could provide some measure of relief to consumers booking travel in March and beyond. The pilots are scheduled to announce results of a strike authorization vote on Tuesday. While no strike date has been set, pilots have been adamant about walking out rather than working under terms imposed by a judge. Northwest has said it would ask a judge to block a strike.
Northwest has asked Gropper to void existing contracts for both its pilots and flight attendants unions, but he has prodded the unions and the company to negotiate new deals.
The flight attendants and Northwest management had a long negotiating session that began on Wednesday and ended in the early-morning hours Thursday.
"We are making slow and steady progress, and hope that we will have a tentative agreement to present to the bankruptcy court" today, said Douglas Moe, vice president for the Professional Flight Attendants Association (PFAA).
At the end of the day, Gropper would rather not "force a contractual rewrite down anyone's throats," said George Singer, a bankruptcy attorney with Lindquist & Vennum in Minneapolis.
While both sides in the pilot talks have expressed some optimism, a negotiated pilots agreement remains far from a given.
Northwest CEO Doug Steenland reiterated Wednesday that the airline needs to secure $1.4 billion in total labor concessions as quickly as possible. The pilots agreed to $250 million in annual concessions in 2004, and now Northwest wants $358 million more in cutbacks from the pilots.
Northwest's operating losses have averaged about $2.6 million a day through the first 11 weeks of its bankruptcy. "We are not in a position where negotiations can go on forever," Steenland said.
On Thursday, McClain said that "there is only so far that we will go" in making concessions. But he, too, stressed the gains since last week, including an agreement on a framework to expand regional flying and still keep pilot jobs at Northwest.
McClain, chairman of the Northwest branch of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), said that both sides can now focus on pay cuts, work-rule changes and other economic issues.
While Northwest wants $358 million in annual concessions in this bargaining round, McClain said that the parties still are about $100 million apart on a final package.
The company still is pushing to pay pilots 75 percent of their wages for sick days, which McClain characterized as "one of the silliest things they've ever done."
The union is pressing Northwest to grant pilots stock when the airline emerges from bankruptcy.
McClain likened the dance between the company and union negotiators to Japanese sumo wrestling. "They circle each other on the mat for about a minute, and all of a sudden they jump at each other," he said. "We're circling each other."
In January, Northwest presented its case to Gropper for rejecting its existing labor contracts, which would allow the carrier to impose new pay rates and work rules on pilots and flight attendants. But Gropper directed both sides to focus on forging deals, saying negotiated agreements would give Northwest a greater chance of succeeding when it exits from bankruptcy.
Today, Gropper will get a status report on how the parties have done. "The judge is getting a sense of where everyone is at and how to break down the walls and the barriers to a negotiated resolution, if that is at all possible," Singer said.
Although the unions and Northwest have been meeting almost daily since early January, they've done so against a backdrop of strike threats. In an interview Wednesday, Steenland declined to comment on whether Northwest is losing any significant amount of business because of the uncertainty over a strike.
Union and airline negotiators packed up their computers and paperwork on Thursday and flew to New York to get ready for their session with Judge Gropper.
It was unclear Thursday night whether the flight attendants and management would reach a deal before entering Gropper's courtroom today.
Hours before they flew to New York, the flight attendant negotiators made one more attempt "to offer management reasonable solutions to reach a consensual agreement," the union said Thursday.
On Wednesday afternoon, Steenland said he thought the differences with the flight attendants union were "narrowing" "
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