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.
"I've worked higher hours a few times and I've always paid for it by being sick," Dutton said. That would be a problem too: The new contract shrinks attendants' sick pay to three-fourths their regular wages.
Then there are other little irritations, Dutton said. For example, Northwest will no longer provide a 32-ounce bottle of water to attendants on long, overseas flights.
"Nobody wants to strike, really," she said. "But you gotta live."
Latest vote closer
In June, flight attendants rejected an earlier contract offer in overwhelming numbers - 80 percent of them voted no. The latest vote was much closer - 55 percent of voting attendants rejected the terms. Within hours of that result, Northwest imposed new pay rates and other work terms that will allow the airline to save $195 million in annual costs.
Flight attendants are the last group targeted for cuts as part of Northwest's goal of slashing its labor costs by $1.4 billion a year.
Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski said that the company is disappointed the membership voted down a contract its own leadership recommended and that any other contract will still have to accommodate $195 million in total cuts, as approved by the court.
"Job actions by flight attendants ... are not in the best interests of our customers, employees or the communities we serve," Blahoski said.
Ricky Thornton, a 17-year Northwest flight attendant who lives in Minneapolis and is a spokesman for AFA-CWA, said some who voted for the contract did so because they felt like they had no choice.
"They've been beaten down. They've given up. And I was among them," he said. "I believed that for the good of the group as a whole, we should take this tentative agreement, because it gave us a platform to build from the next time around."
It was his only realistic choice, too. "In my household there are two of us, both employed by the same company," Thornton said. "My partner has been flying for 11 years, and he would be one of the people being laid off."
Despite his vote, Thornton said he is ready to join the "CHAOS'' campaign. The disruptions, he said, will be effective because they will be sporadic and unpredictable.
"Because it is not a traditional strike,'' he said, "it is a safer approach for our members.''
Profession has changed
Flight attendant Jose Ibarra has set up a website and an e-mail list of 5,000 attendants to rally opposition to the airline.
Ibarra, based in San Francisco, contends that Northwest wants to go back to the days when the ranks of flight attendants were mostly filled with attractive young people who treated the job as a stop on their way to another career. But it has become a profession, he said, with serious safety responsibilities and many veterans with 20-plus years, including him.
Ibarra and other flight attendants also say they are skeptical of Northwest's contract moves because of concessions they made in 1993. The company backed out on a promise to repay them in 2003, citing renewed financial troubles.
"The employees saved the airline from bankruptcy then," Ibarra said. "But when we asked for our payment, management said, `We don't owe you anything.'-"
Schultz, of Minneapolis, said she still counts herself among the fortunate after all she heard while on the staff at the union that preceded AFA-CWA, which took over in July.
Unlike some others in worse financial shape, she is married, her husband works and they have just one child to raise.
"Still, I'm looking and wondering how I'm going to pay my bills and survive on this," Schultz said. "I think a lot of moms are asking themselves, at what point are you paying to be gone?"
It's also true that money is a measure of professional respect, she said. "The bottom line for me is looking at my budget," she said. "But I care about the justice piece, too."
Flight attendants "are a very angry work group," said Mollie Reiley, a 34-year Northwest attendant and interim president of the flight attendants union.
"While we did everything that we could at the table,'' she said last week, "the group has come back and said, `It's not enough.'-"
Staff writer Liz Fedor contributed to this report. H.J. Cummins - 612-673-4671
WHAT'S AT STAKE
Labor analysts say that if the judge blocks a strike it could break the union. But, they say, if the strike occurs and Northwest doesn't handle it well, that could drive the airline into liquidation.
WHAT'S NEXT?
On Wednesday, Northwest will ask U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Allan Gropper in New York to rule that the flight attendants' union cannot strike the airline while it's in bankruptcy.
Copyright 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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