Aviation News Item: 06589

23rd Mar 2010

Source: kansas.com

Labor negotiations between Spirit AeroSystems and the Machinists union open today, and leaders have adopted a new philosophy in their approach.

They're approaching the talks with trust, cooperation and openness, union and company leaders say.

And they plan to work for a contract that will be able to adapt when times change.

Keeping Spirit healthy long-term and keeping its team of employees in place and working together are key to its future, said Spirit chairman and CEO Jeff Turner.

"Clearly a cooperative, peaceful relationship between labor and management is very important for the long-term health of the company," Turner said.

The union recognizes that Spirit operates in a global environment and must plan ahead for the next five or 10 years.

"What's worked in the past may not work today," said Machinists international president Tom Buffenbarger.

The current contract expires June 25. It's the first full contract negotiations since Spirit became a company in 2005 after Boeing sold its Wichita commercial aircraft facilities to Onex Corp.

The five-year contract, however, allowed for negotiations on wages, benefits and some other economic issues to be renegotiated in 2008.

During this round of talks, both sides said they'll forge new ground.

In the existing labor contract model for aerospace, agreements expire every three years. During talks, the company and union try to predict the future, but business and the economy are dynamic. As the recession has proven, things can change quickly.

Rigid contracts leave companies without the flexibility to adapt.

When business is good, employees should share in that as well, they said.

Both parties are committed to putting "that flexibility into play," Turner said.

The question, Buffenbarger said, is that instead of a "fixed hard-and- fast rule book... is there a way we can craft something that's more of a living document?"

Giving that flexibility helps improve job security because it allows the company to adapt and respond to changing conditions, they said.

Current contracts contain a lot of conditions about what happens during layoffs.

But they don't address actions a company could take to try to stem them from happening, Turner said.

"There's often a lot of things you can do before you do it (lay people off)," he said.

From the union's perspective, in the past, the union would "sit back and wait until the company said, 'We're going to have layoffs,' " Buffenbarger said. But the union should instead be working with the company to minimize the damage.

How the new philosophy will translate into the terms of a contract is yet to be worked out.

Dick Gephardt, a former congressman who serves on Spirit's board of directors, noted that Spirit came through one of the worst recessions in decades better than many companies.

"This management and this union have already worked together in tough times," Gephardt said. "I feel optimistic about our ability to figure this out."

The first step, is that "both sides must get over the hurdle and start trusting one another," Buffenbarger said. "Somewhere in this exchange of information, things will come together."

More Aviation News...