Eastern, Unions Reach Agreement Aimed at Cooling Heated Relations

WASHINGTON —  The embattled management of Eastern Air Lines and its unions announced an agreement Wednesday aimed at defusing hostilities that federal investigators have said could threaten the safety of the airline’s flights.

The agreement puts in place “whistle-blower” safeguards, a master labor-management safety committee and other dispute-resolving mechanisms that are standard at many airlines but have been absent from the “poisoned climate” at Eastern, said former Labor Secretary William E. Brock III, who took on the unusual role of government-appointed trouble-shooter in the dispute.

All sides agreed that the pact provides a chance to cool down the heated relations between labor and management at Eastern and to patch up a once-dominant airline that is now reportedly losing $1 million a day. Facing unprecedented scrutiny of its safety practices by federal and congressional investigators, Eastern saw the numbers of its passengers drop 26.3% in May from the previous year.

Mistrust Still Evident

But predictions on whether the airline will ultimately recover are guarded, given the depth of bad feelings within Eastern, which carries about 42 million passengers annually.

“To the degree that . . . (the agreement) opens up lines of communication, this can only help, but it’s too early to tell what will happen down the road,” said Anthony Hatch, an airline analyst with Argus Research Corp. in New York. “Eastern is still down and bruised, and it will take a while to see whether . . . (it) can recover.”

Indeed, management-labor mistrust was still evident even as the parties hailed the agreement as a significant breakthrough.

Charles Bryan, who heads the union that represents 12,000 Eastern mechanics and groundworkers, stressed repeatedly at a Miami press conference that the agreement will ultimately hinge on compliance, and he renewed charges that Eastern management has “blatantly violated” past collective bargaining agreements with its unions.

The accord was reached late Tuesday evening after the highest officials at Eastern, its parent company, Texas Air, and the airline’s three main unions met through the afternoon in Washington with Brock in talks that Bryan described as “a little testy for a while.”

That Brock was able to bring all sides to the table was something of an achievement in itself, analysts said. Under Texas Air’s chairman, Frank Lorenzo, company officials and union leaders have rarely spoken directly, instead exchanging vitriolic charges through the media.

Confrontation has centered on the unions’ bombardment of Congress and the Transportation Department with claims of safety violations and on Eastern management’s attempts to force wage concessions and to transfer ownership of its lucrative Northeast air corridor shuttle business to another Texas Air subsidiary, a plan that was abandoned last week.

‘Get Act Together’

The new agreement establishes top-level and local labor-management committees and arbitration proceedings to resolve safety disputes at the airline. Eastern pledged that no employee will be “harassed, threatened or disciplined” for reporting safety concerns. And “in the spirit of good faith and cooperation, the parties agree to moderate in tone and in volume” their historically rancorous debate, the agreement said.

“The government basically said, ‘Get your act together or else,’ and both sides realized the negative ramifications if they didn’t,” industry analyst Hatch said.

Brock, while stressing that management and labor ultimately will be responsible for repairing the “horrible hemorrhage” in relations, said: “There hasn’t been, up until this point, a house in which all parties could meet. . . . That’s the significance in all this.”

Brock was named by the Transportation Department to act as a mediator in the dispute last month at the close of a plane-by-plane review of Eastern and of Continental Airlines, which is also owned by Texas Air. That inspection showed that while Eastern is currently operating safely, the labor hostilities could endanger future safety.