Loss of Jobs Seen if Company Wins Approval to Hire Foreign Nationals : Pan Am Zeroing In on Its Striking Flight Attendants
Early last month, Selina Swee Singh, a veteran flight attendant, received her latest gold star from Pan American World Airways--a letter informing her that she had been selected as one of the company’s Employees of the Month.
But now Singh, a Westchester resident who has spent 12 years with Pan Am, is afraid that she--and some of her attendant colleagues--may soon be out of a job.
Singh said her position is in jeopardy because of a company proposal that would allow Pan Am to hire a large number of foreign nationals for use in flights abroad and thereby eliminate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jobs now held by members of the Independent Union of Flight Attendants.
“I feel they (Pan Am) are doing it because they want cheap labor to kill the union,” said Singh, a native of Singapore who speaks five languages. She said a company official has told union negotiators that the airline could hire flight attendants in Singapore for $600 a month. Singh’s current base rate of pay is $1,948 a month.
See Pressure Campaign
Singh and other Pan Am attendants feel that the proposal is part of an escalating pressure campaign to stop them from observing picket lines, make them accept an inferior contract and return to work.
For the last two weeks, the attendants have been refusing to cross the picket lines of the striking Transport Workers Union.
(A resumption of talks between the Transport Workers and the airline had been ordered Wednesday in New York by federal mediator Robert Brown, but the talks were rescheduled for today due to what sources described as deep divisions within the union negotiating committee.)
The attendants themselves are in the midst of a 30-day federally mandated “cooling-off period,” which expires April 1. At that time they will be free to strike and the company will be free to impose its contract proposal.
With the company’s pilots and flight engineers crossing the picket lines of the Transport Workers Union, Pan Am is now trying to exert maximum leverage on the attendants, the group the company apparently feels is most vulnerable of the three unions not working.
Margaret Brennan, vice chairperson of the attendants’ union local in Los Angeles, said there is a clear reason why Pan Am is taking a tough stance with the attendants. “They think we’re the most vulnerable of their five unions because we’re overwhelmingly female,” she said, a reference to the fact that 80% of the union’s members are women. “They’re targeting us,” she added.
And union spokesman Brian Moreau said that Pan Am’s attempt to save millions of dollars by gaining the right to hire foreign nationals--who would not be covered by a U.S. union contract--is only one of a number of thorny issues in negotiations with the independent union, which represents only Pan Am’s 6,000 attendants.
Pan Am traditionally has done considerable hiring abroad because it has needs attendants who are fluent in languages other than English and who are familiar with foreign customs. Attendants hired in foreign countries, such as Singh, have been trained in the United States and have had to establish legal U.S. residency in order to work for Pan Am.
In its contract proposal, Pan Am also is demanding that the attendants work more hours, agree to reduced staffing on some flights, assent to lower pay for layovers, make concessions on their health and pension plans, allow the carrier to delay pay increases that the attendants were supposed to have already received, accept a lower overtime wage scale and permit Pan Am to hire new attendants at considerably lower rates of pay than the contract currently calls for, Moreau said in a telephone interview from New York.
Moreau said that if the company gets everything it is seeking, 60% of the union’s members might lose their jobs and the economic well-being of those remaining would be threatened.
Pan Am said it needs the concessions--as well as those it is seeking from its other four unions--if it is to return to profitability in an increasingly competitive industry. Jeffrey Kriendler, the company’s vice president of corporate communications, said the union’s estimates of how many attendants would lose their jobs are “grossly inflated.”
Reactivating Routes
In any case, as the strike moves into its third week, Pan Am has turned more and more attention on the attendants. The campaign began last weekend after the pilots and flight engineers decided to return to their jobs, and Pan Am announced that it would reactivate many routes that had been halted because of the strike, generating a need for more attendants.
Earlier in the strike, Pan Am furloughed about 70% of the attendants. On Saturday, the company started directing some of the attendants to report to work. But the attendants maintain that they have 15 days to return because of their furloughed status.
Pan Am contends, however, that the attendants must return as soon as they are asked because the company is in an “emergency” situation. “They are expected to return to work and there could be consequences if they do not,” Kriendler said.
Dennis Nadale, the flight attendants’ president, said that for several days the carrier illegally threatened some of the union’s members with termination if they did not go back to work. But, he said, the company had halted the practice Wednesday after the union threatened to file a lawsuit.
Train Replacements
Meanwhile, Pan Am has been training 800 people in Miami to serve as replacements for flight attendants if the attendants do not return to work. None of those individuals has been hired yet, but the company could hire and activate them by this weekend, Kriendler said. He also said the company had another group ready to go into training and this week the company has been seeking attendant trainees in newspaper ads.
Tomoko Morita, a Japanese native who has been with Pan Am for 16 years, said she and her colleagues are quite disturbed by Pan Am’s stance in this year’s labor negotiations, and by the prospect that the company might replace them.
“It’s very sad,” Morita said after attending a meeting at the union’s tiny office in El Segundo. “I am very much a company person. I have never missed a flight, never had a grievance. I would have done almost anything for the company.” She added that the attendants agreed to a wage freeze, a wage reduction and other “givebacks” in 1981 and in subsequent years. But she said they have to take a stand now or face the loss of their jobs in the future.
Her sentiments were echoed by Jones Rego, a Brazilian native, who started with Pan Am in 1962. “I love the company. I’m grateful not only to know the world (through flying), but to live in this country and make a good living. But over the years, relations have deteriorated. The company doesn’t give us credit for what we do.” He stressed that all Pan Am attendants are bilingual and many speak several languages.
In response to questions about the quality of Pan Am’s flight attendants, company spokesman Kriendler said: “Pan Am has always felt it had a very professional work force in the attendant ranks.” But he said he would not comment on the quality of the attendants’ union.
