Flight attendants create HAVOC at stockholder meeting
By Mary
Owen
New York
Fed up with stalled negotiations and a decade without a
raise, Northwest Airlines flight attendants disrupted the
company's annual stockholders' meeting here on April 23. Flight
attendants confronted Northwest management by repeatedly
shouting questions from the floor.
Northwest Chair Gary Wilson, unable to restore order,
abruptly ended the meeting by fleeing from the stage.
Outside, several hundred supporters from a cross-section of
labor--including the Central Labor Council, Teamsters, UNITE,
Service Employees, Food and Commercial Workers, Transport
Workers, Auto Workers, and the Mexican Workers
Association--rallied in support of the flight attendants.
The flight attendants, mostly women, are members of
Teamsters Local 2000. The union's giant inflated rubber rat--a
symbol of corporate profiteering--towered over the entrance to
the stockholders' meeting site.
"Management has to get corporate greed under control at
Northwest," said flight attendant Anne Toombs at the rally. "We
shared the bad times, and we deserve to share the good times as
well."
New York-based flight attendant Carolyn Hobbins said she has
to work three jobs just to make ends meet. "You have to treat
employees with respect. We're prepared to strike if we have
to," she told cheering supporters.
Several years ago, flight attendants and other Northwest
workers agreed to a wage freeze to help the financially
strapped airline. Northwest has shown a profit for four of the
last five years, and Wall Street investors in Northwest have
made a 663-percent return since 1992.
Yet flight attendants have gone without raises, adequate
pensions and job security protections.
Disrupting the Northwest stockholders' meeting is part of a
series of flight attendant actions aimed at turning up the heat
in the struggle for a decent contract. Flight attendants are
developing a HAVOC--Have A Voice in Our Contract--campaign that
could feature selective, surprise strikes on Northwest's most
lucrative routes. The campaign is patterned after the
successful CHAOS strategy--Create Havoc Across Our
System--carried out by the Flight Attendants union at Alaska
Airlines in 1993.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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