Flight Attendant Unions Unified for Bargaining

by Mike Hall, Jan 15, 2008

More than 100 representatives from unions representing better than 90,000 flight attendants at 26 U.S. airlines began work last week on joint strategy to raise the standard for wages, retirement, health care, benefits and working conditions for all flight attendants and retirees.

Contracts at those airlines are set to expire during the next two years.

At the three-day, first-ever, Flight Attendant Strategic Bargaining Summit in Washington D.C., Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA) President Patricia Friend told the group:

Working together as a whole is the key to advancing our profession. Regardless of who we are individually, our members are all flight attendants. We have seen how airline management groups borrow from each other during negotiations, and it is time to turn the table. By creating a single message on key issues, we have a better chance of tackling the corporate machine.

For the past several years, flight attendants and other airline workers have sacrificed pay, benefits and working conditions through a long series of bankruptcies, restructurings, layoffs and threatened liquidations.

In a joint statement following the summit, Machinists (IAM) District 142 President Julie Frietchen, Transport Workers (TWU) Local 556 President Thom McDaniel, Tommie Hutton-Blake, president of the unaffiliated Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), and Friend said:

With the majority of flight attendant contracts open for negotiations in the next two years, we have a rare opportunity to increase our leverage through close coordination of bargaining strategy, field mobilization, information sharing and communications.

 

Our fight extends beyond our legitimate and necessary contract demands. We also stand together to overturn the trend toward ever more excessive executive compensation, and to put an end to anti-worker labor relations practices across the industry.

As part of their drive to develop a bargaining blueprint for the flight attendants unions, summit attendees heard from leading academics, labor economists, consultants and lawyers. In addition, they focused on the best way to mobilize union members for the upcoming talks.

Carla Rogat, former president of the AFA-CWA local representing attendants at Mesaba Airlines, said it was a unified membership that helped the worker secure a more fair contract during the airline’s emergence from bankruptcy.

We didn’t realize the power we had behind us until we had our first rally, which we simulcast to all of our local councils across the country. After that event, the movement took off, and it was because of the overwhelming support from our memberships that we were able to emerge from the bankruptcy process in a much better position.

The coalition will meet again in March.

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