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Flight Attendants, Northwest Airlines Reach Tentative Agreement |
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Less than 10 days after they chose the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA to represent them, flight attendants at Northwest Airlines reached a tentative agreement with management July 17 on a new contract—meeting a court-ordered deadline.
The settlement, reached after a week of intense bargaining and a marathon negotiation session, was concluded on the date set by a federal bankruptcy court as the deadline for an agreement. If no agreement had been reached, Northwest would have been able to impose a contract on the 9,300 flight attendants.
Details of the contract will not be released until the Northwest Master Executive Council, made up of local presidents from each airport where attendants are based in the Northwest system, meets in the next few days. The MEC will review the tentative contract before deciding whether to send it out for membership ratification.
With the airline in bankruptcy, the deal was always going to be about survival, says Mollie Reiley, interim president of the Master Executive Council:
We left no stone unturned and have made a significant difference together, but this is not a day that we celebrate. We have an agreement that will give flight attendants hope for the future and one that allows us to fight another day.
Our flight attendants rightfully demanded to see improvements in the terms of the previous tentative agreement. We have addressed the areas that caused the greatest concern in order to make this agreement one that we can live with today and build upon.
On June 30, a federal bankruptcy judge gave Northwest permission to impose terms of a tentative agreement the flight attendants already had rejected if a new agreement could not be reached within two weeks.
The Northwest flight attendants voted June 6 by a 5–1 margin to reject the previous tentative agreement, which union leaders say included concessions totaling $195 million.
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