NWA Flight Attendants Ready for a Fight

Flight attendant Karen Schultz has spent 21 years as the smiling public face of Northwest Airlines. Now she's preparing for a radical new role: To disrupt the company's operations by taking part in random, unannounced job walkouts.

"Striking makes me nervous, but I'm ready," said Schultz, who lives in Minneapolis but flies out of Detroit.

She and as many as 9,000 other Northwest flight attendants, who rejected the airline's latest contract offer last week, are vowing to launch a retaliatory campaign beginning Aug. 15 that they are calling "CHAOS,'' an acronym for Create Havoc Around Our System.

Their plan could affect many Northwest flights because the attendants say they may report to planes for work, then walk off just before boarding. Or stay on board but serve passengers only leaflets about their cause. Northwest officials say those steps would violate federal labor law.

The showdown, which moves to federal court this week, threatens to bring more turmoil to the nation's fifth-largest airline, which filed for bankruptcy last fall.

On Wednesday, the airline will make its case to a bankruptcy judge that the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) cannot legally strike while the company is in bankruptcy - where it has sought and won labor concessions that it says are crucial to the airline's survival.

Struggling to stay afloat amid competition from low-cost carriers and record fuel costs, Northwest lost $3.6 billion in the 4 1/2 years before filing for bankruptcy.

The days ahead may be pivotal for the airlines and the union, some analysts say. Northwest, based in Eagan, dominates the air-travel market in the Twin Cities.

"If there's an injunction, it could effectively break the union," said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

But, he said, "if the strikers can't be replaced and other unions join in, and I think they would, it could drive Northwest into liquidation."

In an e-mail to flight attendants last week, Northwest CEO Doug Steenland said that management had hoped for a ratified attendants' deal.

"After two failed tentative agreements,'' he said, "it is clear that there are no easy or quick ways to reach this [cost-cutting] goal."

Flight attendants say they know the risks they face. Over the past year, they have watched Northwest mechanics lose their jobs in a strike. And they have seen pilots and ground workers back down and agree to steep pay cuts.

But they also say they have had enough - or have nothing left to lose.

Schultz, for example, said she cannot figure out how to keep flying with 40 percent less. The cut drops her wages from $40,000 to $24,000. And from that take out about $16,000 in taxes and child care, she said, and her plan to put aside more for her 401(k) - since her pension will be frozen - doesn't look very promising.

Northwest flight attendants staged a picketing session in Detroit on Friday and plan to do the same Monday afternoons at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Contract deemed too long

Flight attendant Beth Dutton's biggest complaint is the length of the contract - 5 1/2 years. It's one thing to agree to salary and other concessions for a little while, through desperate times, said Dutton, of Vadnais Heights, a 21-year veteran at Northwest.

But she and other flight attendants said they do not want to be locked into these terms if the airline turns around. And they have watched Northwest report profits on its operations - separate from its reorganizing and other special expenses - in March, April and May.

New working conditions are also a problem, Dutton said. The contract increases the attendants' standard in-flight hours by one-quarter, to as many as 100 a month. Add to that their uncounted work time, such as layovers and boarding and deplaning passengers, and the new terms will force many attendants to give up second jobs they've had, Dutton and others said.