Northwest to lay off
1,400 flight attendants

The airline wastes no
time restructuring
to improve its finances

MINNEAPOLIS » Northwest Airlines Corp. said yesterday it will lay off 1,400 flight attendants by January as it shrinks in bankruptcy, just months after it re-hired some of them.

The flight attendants union also said Northwest is pressing to use more locally hired, nonunion flight attendants on overseas flights as another way to save money -- a proposal the union said would result in the outsourcing of those jobs to cheaper labor markets overseas and which it will fight.

The layoffs will begin with 900 furloughs on Oct. 31, including 480 in Detroit, Northwest's largest hub, and 355 in Minneapolis. The remainder would come by January, according to a memo by a Northwest vice president for in-flight services that was provided by the Professional Flight Attendants Association.

Northwest employed about 8,500 flight attendants on May 31.

Northwest said when it filed for Chapter 11 protection last week that it would furlough more workers, and last week the pilot's union said 400 pilots would be laid off in coming months. The carrier has indicated it would reduce its schedule by at least 5 percent to 6 percent.

"These actions were necessary in order for NWA to build a competitive cost structure and a more effective business model," the memo said.

Over the summer, Northwest recalled flight attendants who had been laid off after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Bob Krabbe, a spokesman for the flight attendants union. Northwest even ran ads recruiting new flight attendants, although it said that was in case current flight attendants staged a sympathy strike with mechanics, who walked out on Aug. 20.

"We're most disturbed by the company's issuing notices of furlough to people they just got done recalling," Krabbe said. "We think that it shows a callous disregard for these individuals and their lives."