In a move apparently unprecedented in Vance Air Force Base’s 68-year history, a group of students and instructors left Enid Monday so they could resume training elsewhere.

The move was caused by the strike by nearly 800 union employees of CSC Applied Technologies LLC and three subcontractors, a work stoppage that entered its second week Monday.

A KC-135 Stratotanker from Altus AFB left Vance shortly after 11 a.m., carrying 27 students and instructors from three classes, one undergraduate class and two from the Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals program.

The undergraduate class, number 09-11, is scheduled to graduate July 2. IFF is a program for recent pilot training graduates taking advance training before flying fighters or bombers.

The Vance instructors and students have been divided between two Texas bases, Randolph AFB in San Antonio and Laughlin AFB in Del Rio.

These students, said 1st Lt. Agneta Murnan, public affairs chief at Vance, will take no further training at Vance. Instead, they will remain at either Laughlin or Randolph until their classes are finished.

“The leadership of the 71st Flying Training Wing is working with its chain of command to carefully evaluate both the impact of the strike on mission requirements and alternative solutions as needed,” Murnan said in a written statement.

The Pentagon announced Friday 33 students and instructors would be temporarily transferred from Vance.

“With mission requirements, that number changed to 27,” Murnan said.

To date, no Vance aircraft have been transferred to other bases.

“Any plans to move aircraft is something we would coordinate with AETC (Air Education and Training Command) on,” Murnan said.

Thus far, Murnan said, the strike has cost Vance an estimated 1,000 training flights.

This is the first strike at Vance since 1965, when 58 firefighters staged a 97-day work stoppage. Military firefighters were brought in to replace the strikers, however, and the flying mission continued.

Members of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local Union 898 began their strike at 12:01 a.m. June 8. On June 5, the union voted by a 96 percent margin to reject the company’s contract offer, then voted by a 94 percent margin to strike.

The two sides in the dispute have yet to return to the bargaining table.

“We don’t want to be here,” said Gary Richardson, CSC program manager at Vance. “We want to have people working. We want to be supporting our customers. We want Enid, Okla., to be stabilized.

“We care about those people out there. We care about the United States Air Force, we care about the city of Enid.”

Richardson said CSC and its three sub-contractors, DenMar Services, M1 Support Services and PRI/DJI will extend until October the terms of the collective bargaining agreement that expired at midnight June 7.

“All we want to do is go back to the table,” Richardson said. “We want to put our people back to work and sit down and negotiate those issues. They (the union) just refuse to do that. They want everything we have proposed taken off the table. If that is the case there is nothing to negotiate.”

“Pickets are holding well,” said Jerry McCune, president and directing business representative for IAMAW District Lodge 171, of which Local 898 is a part. “We’re still out, 99 percent, just waiting for the company to change their bargaining position. Their proposal is rigid and severe.

“They still say this was a good offer. They want people to go back to work and then sit there and bargain. That’s what we did for eight days. It was not productive.”

Peter Van Dyke, a veteran labor attorney who represents CSC, said he has seen nothing like the Vance standoff in his more than 30-year career.

“I have never been in a negotiation like this,” he said. “We are not wedded to this (contract) language. This is our idea of how we can address these issues. We would like to have some discussion about these things. We were told right from the outset there would not be discussion.”

Van Dyke said the federal mediator involved in the negotiations was making progress until late the night of June 3.

“At about 10:30 Wednes-day night a message came back that the union was tired of this and they were no longer going to engage in this process,” Van Dyke said. “We spent the whole next day getting our last, best and final offer prepared. With the progress we were making, if we could have spent Thursday and Friday (June 4-5) talking and making that progress, this whole thing could have been avoided.”

“The only thing that developed (from the previous negotiations) was their last, best and final offer, which their employees and our members rejected by 96 percent,” McCune said. “The mandate of our membership is we will stay out as long as necessary until we get an offer to go back to the table and correct some of these problems, both economic and non-economic issues. At that point then we’re willing to bargain.”

McCune said the union is asking CSC to use the current contract language as the starting point for negotiations.

“The essence of any discussion is to at least have the ability to present issues so they can be discussed,” Van Dyke said. “Once that environment was started by the mediator they (the union) bro-ught them to a halt. Until that happened, I was very encouraged we were making some progress. On several of the important issues we were one word away from reaching an agreement.”

Richardson said CSC has run ads seeking replacement workers, but stopped that process.

“We thought it was a little premature,” he said.

The union’s strike Web site (vancestrike.blogspot. com) announced four affidavits were filed Friday concerning unfair labor practices charges leveled against CSC by Local 898.

The union charges CSC met with employees and offered proposals never presented to union representatives at the bargaining table; waited until the 11th hour to present an economic proposal; held employee meetings to explain its final offer without the union having an opportunity to do so; and provided the union with a written proposal, then told employees the CSC proposal was different than the one the union presented to its members. The charges have been filed with the National Labor Relations Board.