Oil spill response workers in Tacoma are on strike to protest what they say is illegal discrimination and intimidation by their employer, the Marine Spill Response Corporation.

Three MSRC workers and a dozen union supporters began picketing on Port of Tacoma Road early Monday morning.
The workers say MSRC is punishing them for voting to unionize by refusing to let them participate in spill-response training exercises in Everett this week.

MSRC spokeswoman Judith Roos said the training is for entry-level employees and would be redundant for the Tacoma crew. “They are more senior and more experienced,” Roos said. “They have participated previously.”

The Tacoma MSRC employees voted to join a labor union – the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific (IBU) – in 2006, but they have not been able to complete contract negotiations with MSRC.

MSRC was not called to respond to a 100-gallon spill in Tacoma Monday. If they are asked to respond to a spill while on strike, they will immediately do so, said Klete Freudenstein, one of the striking workers.

“The environment is our number one concern,” Freudenstein said.

The economic downturn will have a silver lining for some travelers this coming Labor Day holiday.

Passenger traffic on U.S. airlines is expected to be down about a million travelers this holiday compared with last year. Those 16 million air travelers are expected to be about 5.7 percent fewer than the number who traveled in 2007.

Those new figures come from the Air Transport Association which said high energy prices and cutbacks in airline schedules coupled with rising airfares are responsible.

The decline is the first since 2002 when the effects of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were first felt on a Labor Day holiday.

More than 45.4 percent of the world's flying airliners were built by Boeing, a new survey shows.

Flight International's annual survey of the world's airlines shows Boeing rival Aibus in second place with 20.2 percent or 4,843 airliners. Boeing airliners total 10,906 in the world's fleets.

Canada's Bombardier was in third place with 10.4 percent or 2,511 planes. Brazil's Embraer is fourth with 6.6 percent of aircraft of 1,575 planes.

Other facts from the survey:

* The oldest aircraft in airline service on average are flying in Africa, where the average airliner is 20 years old.

* The youngest are in Asia where aircraft average just 10 years old.

* In North America, the average airliner is 14 years old.

* Boeing's backlog of unfilled orders exceeded that of Airbus by 83 planes.

* Production from Russian commercial airplane factories has slowed to a trickle. Of the 1,229 airliners delivered in the last 12 months, only 16 came from Russian or former Soviet bloc factories.

While some airports, particularly those in popular tourist destination such as Las Vegas, Honolulu and Orlando, are seeing a rapid falloff of airline flights this year, Sea-Tac expects to see seat availability drop only .6 percent.

Figures from the Official Airline Guide show gains in international routes while decreases and increases to major domestic destinations balance out to the negative side by a small margin.

New competition on the West Coast in particular is driving up the availability of seats both to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The number of seats available to Los Angeles is up 11.9 percent while the number to San Francisco is increasing 13.9 percent.

Virgin America, a new San Francisco-based carrier, began flying to those two destination this year from Sea-Tac. It's main competitor, Alaska Airlines, increased flights to compete.

Increased competition is also the story in the Seattle-Minneapolis market where seats available are up 21.5 percent. Alaska Airlines is inaugurating new service to the Twin Cities in competition to the established non-stop carriers, Northwest and Sun Country.

On the bottom end of the charter is Las Vegas where seats available to the gambling capital are expected to fall 11.5 percent this year. Other major decreases include Chicago and Houston, where hub carriers such as American and United and Continental are trimming redundancies from their schedules.

Tacoma gas prices continued their decline this week with the average for a gallon of unleaded regular hitting $3.926, down nearly four cents from last Tuesday.

And at one Pierce County station, Costco in Puyallup, regular was selling for $3.74 a gallon according to TacomaGasPrices.com.

On a statewide basis, fuel prices retreated again today with unleaded regular selling for $3.985 for a gallon. That's .7 cent less than Sunday's average.

Still Washington prices remain far above the national average, according to AAA Washington. Nationally, unleaded regular averages $3.741 a gallon today.

Highest average gas prices were in Alaska today at $4.571 a gallon and the lowest in Missouri at $3.506.

Ironically, Alaska is the source of millions of gallons of crude oil while Missouri's production in miniscule.

Among major Washington metropolitan areas, the lowest average gas prices were in Vancouver at $3.891 a gallon. The highest were in the Tri-Cities were regular sold for $4.056 per gallon on average today.