Tens of thousands of holiday travelers looked to friendlier skies Tuesday after President Clinton helped end the crippling strike against American Airlines in time for Thanksgiving.
The airline and the 21,000-member Association of Professional Flight Attendants agreed Monday to submit their more than year-old contract quarrel to binding arbitration.The flight attendants immediately dropped picket signs they took up last Thursday and went back to work.
"I think given this agreement, there is no doubt that we will be able to get everybody where they're going in time for Thanksgiving," American Chairman Robert L. Crandall said.
American said it hopes to fly up to 70 percent of its schedule Tuesday and about 85 percent by Wednesday, probably the busiest travel day of the year.
But some passengers were still miffed. "It's too bad it wasn't over yesterday," said Bill Ball, who had to rebook his flight from Miami to Baltimore.
The walkout disrupted holiday travel plans for many of the 200,000 travelers American carries each day. Passengers were able to travel on fewer than half of scheduled flights.
The strike's end was a victory for the flight attendants, who previously agreed to binding arbitration and sought the appointment of a special presidential panel to mediate the dispute over pay, work rules and other issues.
"We shut down the world's largest airline for five straight days. And in the final analysis, we did what management would not do," said union President Denise Hedges. "We sought and brought about an end to the crisis."American and United Airlines compete as the top two largest airlines in the country.
Unions representing United's ground crews and pilots ordered a de facto slowdown Monday by urging members to follow all safety rules and other regulations to the letter. That threatened to create some Thanksgiving snarls, but nothing resembling the specter of chaos created by the American walkout.
The American Airlines agreement appeared to save 4,000 flight- attendant jobs that Crandall had threatened to cut when the planned 11-day strike was to end next week. "We have agreed with the president that we will take all the flight attendants back," he said Monday.
American began hiring and training replacement flight attendants during the strike, but the new hires were no longer promised jobs.
"Everybody won - the flight attendants won, the company won," flight attendant Jeanette Sugg said during a boisterous celebration at union headquarters near Fort Worth.
Crandall, however, worried that an arbitrator would split the difference between the airline's offer and the flight attendants' demands, making a new contract too expensive for the carrier.
Crandall had said the strike cost the airline at least $10 million a day and that the changes the union sought would cost the airline $500 million a year.
Clinton's involvement, while unusual, comes as he tries to mollify unions angered by the North American Free Trade Agreement and as Crandall seeks federal help to gain access to more foreign airports. It was the most direct involvement in a strike by the White House since then-President Ronald Rea-gan dismissed striking air traffic controllers in 1981.