Originally Posted by
jetnwa
Alfa,
Although I am new to this forum, I think your memory of NWA history is a little off esp with the NWA F/As events in Ch-11. Carl is correct in the fact the pilots took the first deal as there was a veiled pension threat termination driving the vote.
The F/As really held their ground on many issues. One of the biggest things they kept was the minimum day in which we lost. Quite frankly, that was huge as our NB schedules were terrible after Ch-11.
The F/As were under a tremendous amount of pressure to capitulate and they really delayed things during Ch-11. Management had already exterminated the AMFA mechs and the EMT was threatening the F/As with Replacement F/As ads in newspapers. There was also the ever present threat of outsourcing the Asia lines to Asia based, non-contract F/As.
The F/As delayed the contract so long that NWA management had to petition the CH-11 judge with their Executive Compensation Plan. The company couldn't wait any longer. The jist was DS would walk away with 26 million dollars and others would get 10 million etc.
The final F/A vote for the last contract offer was extremely close and nothing near crawling back to the company. NWA finally settled the AMFA strike (basically paid some sort of severance to the striking mechs who lost their jobs to the Replacement Mechs) and the company exited Ch-11.
The claim sale may have been in issue for the F/A to vote yes on the final contract but there is no doubt who was the thorn in the side to NWA management during CH-11. It was the F/As pure and simple.
This is how I remembered it all going down.....
I don't know how the pilot negotiations went, I was concentrating on our own problems. The flight attendants had their contract rejected by the bankruptcy judge. The judge allowed management to impose a contract which was the second failed TA (the one under AFA). The flight attendants were barred by injunction from striking. So they ended up with an imposed contract and no right to strike, that doesn't sound like a position of power to me.
They only settled on a deal at the very end in order to get a small bankruptcy claim. They also converted a lump sum meant for early retirement to other compensation. This was the only change to their imposed contract of any substance. The flight attendants were definitely a pain to management, but the question is what did they get from it. None of the deals varied by any significant degree from the first failed TA.
Clearly their compensation was less than what the Delta flight attendants got with no contract, especially when you consider the Delta F/A's got a much bigger share of the stock. So if your goal is to be a pain to management, the NWA F/A's succeeded. If your goal was to maximize your compensation, they came up short.
I don't know anything about AMFA and their strike, but that did not seem to work out well for them from the little I heard. Maybe you know something different. Certainly, it didn't take the mechanics very long to ditch AMFA and take the Delta non-contract deal after the merger closed.