While it has been expanding its destination network and celebrating the purchase of more than 130 new aircraft for its fleet, Denver’s Frontier Airlines has also been in the throes of negotiations with its pilots union. The latter is pushing for a new contract with higher pay rates to replace the collective bargaining agreement it agreed to in 2009 when Frontier was tangling with bankruptcy.
Representatives with the Air Line Pilots Association’s Frontier unit met with the National Mediation Board Jan. 10 to discuss the negotiations, union officials say. That meeting is being viewed as the next step toward resolving the contract dispute that prompted the airline’s more than 1,200 pilots to vote in September to strike if negotiations — which have been underway for nearly two years — fall apart before a new deal is struck.
Frontier officials confirmed they met with the mediation board in a separate meeting Tuesday, though the airline did not offer details about what was discussed in that meeting.
The two meetings come after the Air Line Pilot’s Association wrote a letter to the board in December urging the federal agency to get more involved in the dispute over what the association dubbed “the industry’s last surviving pilot bankruptcy contract.”
“ALPA has exhausted every avenue to reach a new agreement that contains non-bankruptcy, market-standard pay and benefit terms and conditions,” the letter reads. “Management has plainly failed ‘to exert every reasonable effort’ to promptly settle this dispute, as required by the Railway Labor Act.”
Union officials have said the current agreement has Frontier pilots working on contracts that are 40 percent below market rates.
Frontier officials have said the airline has no intention of letting its pilots walk off the job, which cannot happen while federal mediation is ongoing.