Claim Payout The Deciding Factor

By no means was it a resounding victory, but Northwest Airlines will take what it can get. On Tuesday, the airline's flight attendants voted to ratify a tentative labor agreement -- the third negotiated between the airline, and two separate flight attendants unions -- albeit by the slimmest of margins.

The Associated Press reports the final vote from the 6,442 flight attendants eligible to cast ballots worked out to 50.9 percent in favor of the deal, to 49.1 against. A mere 104 votes made the difference.

"By no means is this concessionary agreement acceptable to our members," said NWA AFA-CWA President Jay Hong, "but considering the difficulties we’ve encountered with the National Mediation Board, the White House, the courts and the impossible negotiations posture of Northwest Airlines, the majority of our members have said today that this agreement represents the best we could do under the anti-worker conditions we found ourselves negotiating in. We will continue to rebuild and fight for a better contract in the future."

As ANN reported, Northwest announced the tentative agreement April 26. Shortly after that, it was revealed the top 400 managers at the airline would receive stock option bonuses, working out to ownership of about five percent of the carrier.

Unions at the airline were less than pleased... which likely influenced what already looked to be a squeaker vote.

Under the new contract, top pay for flight attendants will be capped at roughly $35,400 a year, down from about $44,000 before Northwest filed for Chapter 11 protection in September 2005. On the positive side, each flight attendant stands to earn as much as $15,000 on top of that, as a one-time payout on a $182 million claim in Northwest's bankruptcy reorganization. The actual amount depends on what the claim ultimately sells for.

Had the flight attendants voted down the third TA, the union would have lost that claim when Northwest emerges from Chapter 11... which could happen as soon as Thursday. Hong said that fact weighed most heavily on the union's decision to put the contract to a vote, and the way that vote turned out.

"I made no bones about why we did this, we did this because of the equity claim. That was not something I think the union could justifiably make a decision" on, he said. "It's always the flight attendants that are going to make a decision about money like that."

In addition to financial solvency, the end to the flight attendant labor dispute will place Northwest in another unfamiliar situation: relative peace throughout its unions. The airline, which has suffered two strikes since 1998, has locked all its employees into contracts through the end of 2011.

FMI: www.nwa.com, www.nwaafa.org