The 2,600 Tristate residents who work for Comair but don't fly planes are still picking up paychecks, even though the shutdown caused by the pilots is about to enter its fourth week.

        Taking the daily payroll hit has earned the Erlanger-based airline a lot of employee goodwill and good public relations, to be sure.

Comair agents Angie Rowland (left) and Brenda Spegal handled paperwork March 26, the day the strike began. (Michael E. Keating photos) | ZOOM |

        But Comair also is saving itself a big headache if and when the strike ends.

        By keeping its employees close to the vest, Comair is trying to avoid having to train a whole new set of workers in an industry that is training-intensive.

        And efforts to keep employees busy range from cleaning plane galleys with toothbrushes to working for local soup kitchens to relearning how to serve drinks.

        “It's very logical an airline would like to minimize the disruption when a strike is settled,” says Brian Harris, airline analyst for the Wall Street firm Salomon Smith Barney. “It's not like boom — everything is back to normal. It takes awhile to ramp up, and you want to minimize the ramp-up as much possible.”

        That can only be done with a fully-trained work force. And in airlines, workers can take up to 6-8 weeks to learn jobs such as checking in customers for a flight, fueling up a jet in less than 30 minutes or repairing a jet engine's cracked flange.

COMAIR WORKERS

Here's a breakdown of Comair's approximately 5,400 employees:    • Pilots: 1,350.    • Flight attendants: 700.    • Mechanics and mechanical support staff: 500.    • Customer service (gate agents, baggage handlers and ramp workers, etc): 1,500.    • Administrative: 1,300.    Employees based at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport:    • Nonpilots: 2,600.    • Pilots: 1,000.    Source: Comair

        “We are not only trying to manage this airline through the strike, but manage the airline to be ready for the end of the strike,” says Comair spokesman Nick Miller. “And we also want to be able to serve the customer, and the best way to do that is to have everything in place to run smoothly with fully-trained employees in place.”

        Comair's 1,350 pilots walked off on March 26, citing differences over work rules, retirement benefits, job protection and pay.

        Comair has vowed to keep paying full salary and benefits for its entire non-pilot staff of 4,000, which includes about 2,600 locally at the company hub and headquarters at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

        Officials for the Delta Air Lines subsidiary won't say how much the strike is costing them in payroll per day, but one Wall Street analyst has estimated the overall impact is as much as $2.5 million a day, meaning Comair has lost $52.5 million through today.

        But Comair's non-striking employees have been keeping busy. There have been multitudes of training classes, while employees have swarmed the airlines 119-plane fleet for a deep cleaning. And Thursday, company officials announced some idled employees would be placed on loan to Tristate social service agencies.

        “The reaction was overwhelming when we told the employees about the volunteer program,” says Steve Ellis, Comair's general manager for ramp and tower operations. “The employees appreciate the effort to keep them active.”

        But Mr. Ellis admits that if employees were to leave due to boredom or layoffs, it would have a major impact on operations, especially since tower workers — who coordinate planes entering and leaving gates as well as other vehicles such as luggage carts — require 6-8 weeks of training before they can man a station solo.

        And ramp workers, who load and unload luggage, refuel and de-ice planes and help guide planes into and out of gates, take at least 2-3 weeks.

Comair employees have kept busy with classes and maintenance work during the pilots' strike. The airline hopes to keep ready for the strike's end and save the cost of retraining new workers. | ZOOM |

        “There definitely would be some hindrance, especially in the tower,” Mr. Ellis says.

        Another group that has undergone intensive training are the 500 or so mechanics. Mechanic union official Dan Pennington says a trained mechanic is highly prized throughout the airline industry.

        “I've heard discussions about people saying they could easily find work if layoffs come,” says Mr. Pennington, shop steward for Local 804 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. “It doesn't matter if it's an RJ (regional jet) or (Boeing) 727, a jet engine is still an engine and still the same components.”

        Despite the efforts to keep the payroll full, relations between non-pilot employees and the company have been mixed.

        The mechanics union has publicly supported the pilots as much as possible — buying picketing pilots lunch.

        “We know what they're going through, and for the most part, we support them,” says Mr. Pennington, who has led the union through two, at times contentious, contract negotiations with the company. The last set of talks included informational pickets at the airport by the mechanics.

        Officials from the flight attendants' union, a branch of the Teamsters, refused comment, saying they were afraid of disciplinary action if they talked.

        The 700-member flight attendant union has been negotiating its first contract with the company since it was established at Comair in 1996.

        With negotiations in their second year, several of those flight attendants conducted a sympathy parade in front of the airport's Terminal 3 during the first week of the pilot strike.

        But many employees have lauded the airline for keeping them not only on payroll but actually busy.

        “A lot of companies, if they had shut down, they would close the doors and say "see you at the end of this thing' to the employees,” says Brenda Ryan, a ramp worker from Newport.

        Sherri Porter, a 7-year veteran customer service gate agent, says that she knows she could leave and get another job in no time at the airport with her skills.

        “But knowing that Comair has kept us on and is doing the right thing makes me want to stay through this thing even more,” says Ms. Porter of Hebron.

        Still, there are those who wonder how long the company can keep paying employees and question the financial wisdom of the move.

        “In my view, it really doesn't take that much to retrain ground employees,” says Raymond Neidl, airline analyst for the Wall Street firm ING Barings. “It's a much larger hit to take on your payroll than it is to retrain people. They've got to start thinking about layoffs at some point, sooner probably more than later.”

        But Comair's Mr. Miller says it's the current policy that makes sense.

        “What we are developing is a creative, innovative way to keep our valued employees on board,” he says.
       

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