This is COMPLETELY disgusting.... they want to contract out ALL international flying and all flying under 100 seats.
Would the currently active mainline F/As take notice if US follows suit and tries to contract out the international flying? TransAtlantic Airways- The A350 Division? Would they be laughing then?
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Flight attendants feeling heat, too
Doug Grow, Star Tribune
August 30, 2005 GROW0830
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At the moment, Northwest mechanics may be the airline's only striking union. But the mechanics aren't really alone.
As the mechanics march on the picket line, the company's other unions also are being targeted by a company that's demanding big concessions from everyone -- except top executives.
But no union can be involved in stranger negotiations than the Professional Flight Attendants Association (PFAA). Sometimes, PFAA leaders don't know whether to laugh or cry at words coming from the lips of straight-faced corporate types.
For example, according to Karen Schultz, a 20-year flight attendant now working with the union's negotiating team, there was this little gem from Northwest:
"If there is a crash," Schultz said, "they want to stop our pay at first impact."
What if the plane bounces?
"First impact," Schultz said.
Peter Fiske, also a 20-year flight attendant who is a member of the union's executive board, added this dandy from the company:
"If something happens while you're overseas and you die, the company would not pay to have your body shipped back," he said.
You mean, if a flight attendant is shot dead by a terrorist on some foreign tarmac, the company wouldn't pay to have the body shipped back?
"That's right," Fiske said.
Remarkably, those may be the highlights of the company's offer.
With negotiations set to resume today, the flight attendants are facing the same impossible situation mechanics faced: Northwest is making offers the union must refuse.
The company wants $143 million from attendants' pockets, not including a pension freeze. Northwest wants to cut the pay of its highest-paid flight attendants, who can make up to about $46,000 a year, by 20 percent. (It takes a flight attendant 15 years of service to get to the $40,000 level.) And it wants to take 8 percent from its lowest-paid flight attendants, who now receive a meager $16,000.
And the "offer" keeps getting worse.
Northwest wants flight attendants to pay for their own training. (Attendants all know such things as CPR and other first-aid techniques.)
And worse.
Northwest is demanding the right to use nonunion "foreign nationals" as flight attendants on all international flights. It also is demanding to use nonunion personnel on planes with 100 or fewer seats.
Union leaders say this offer would wipe out 5,600 of the union's 9,736 jobs.
Fiske, and others, think what Northwest wants to do is use an independent contractor to supply the airline with cheap flight attendants on the international flights and on smaller planes.
Northwest's actions toward some of its most dedicated workers is frightening and painful.
It's frightening because Northwest is showing, in its dealings with mechanics, that there's no room for conversation. It's the company's way, or else.
"But we really can't afford to waste time being frightened," Fiske said. "Our members are counting on us."
Said Schultz: "We all leave here at the end of the day, go home, go to bed and wonder, 'Did I do enough today? Is there something more I could have done?' I truly believe that we're representing every American worker. I've got a 4½-year-old son at home, and my goal is that when he gets to high school, there'll be a little bit in his history book showing that Northwest flight attendants stood up and helped stopped the terrible things happening to American workers."
What's painful, Schultz and Fiske said, is the fact that through this whole process, Northwest executives never came to union leaders and said, "Let's work together" to solve the economic mess that dates back to 1989 and a leveraged buyout by Al Checci and Gary Wilson.
"It breaks our heart," Fiske said. "There's no talk. They have a scorched-Earth, take-no-prisoners approach to their own employees."
The future, the union leaders fear, is just across the highway from PFAA headquarters. That's where mechanics are lugging picket signs, alone for now.
Doug Grow is at
dgrow@startribune.com.
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