Top News

NEW YORK (AP) ― Northwest Airlines wants to replace 30 percent of flight attendants on its international flights with non-U.S. flight attendants, roughly 800 people, to cut costs so that it can emerge from bankruptcy, a company executive testified in a New York bankruptcy court Thursday.

Northwest, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September, seeks to save $1.4 billion in wage and benefit costs. Thursday was the seventh day of hearings devoted to the airline's request to toss out collective bargaining agreements with the unions.

"Outsourcing would be a misnomer," said Michael Becker, Northwest's senior vice president of human resources and labor relations, in response to a cross-examination by Thomas Ciantra, attorney for the pilots union. Becker was referring to the carrier's plans to replace U.S. flight attendants with foreign workers.

Becker also testified that the foreign flight attendants would not be part of the U.S.-based flight attendants union, the Professional Flight Attendants Association. Becker said Northwest would save $20.2 million by hiring non-U.S. flight attendants.

Northwest employs 8,952 flight attendants. Company spokesman Bill Mellon later told The Associated Press that the non-U.S. flight attendants could, in theory, be represented by a trade group akin to a U.S. union.

The carrier had maintained that it needed to hire foreign workers as flight attendants because of their language and culture skills to better serve international flights such as one between Narita, Japan, and Honolulu where 90 percent to 95 percent of its passengers are Japanese nationals.

An official with the flight attendants union, meanwhile, questioned the carrier's plans for its international flights.

"We (Northwest flight attendants) have been going across the Pacific for 70 years and offering excellent service," Karen Schultz, spokeswoman for the PFAA, told the Associated Press after Becker's testimony. "Our (plane) loads are full. We continue to have the highest loads because of excellent flight attendant service, which includes cultural sensitivity and language skills."

As part of the resistance to the proposal to replace union members with foreign workers, union leader Bob Krabbe told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that the union has offered to take a 22.5 percent pay cut and give up 1,553 jobs.

Krabbe, contract administrator for the PFAA, told the newspaper, "One of the things our members said loud and clear is that they did not want their jobs outsourced."

Neither Krabbe nor Schultz immediately returned telephone messages left Friday morning from The Associated Press.

The union claims they gave their proposal to the airline on Tuesday and that it meets NWA's target of cutting flight-attendant costs by $195 million annually. By reducing vacation accruals, another 156 jobs would be lost.

"We felt it was better to risk temporarily losing those jobs than to permanently lose them to foreign workers," Krabbe told the newspaper.

He said the union was also pressing for an early-retirement plan, which would provide some jobs for junior flight attendants who stay with the company.

-------

Northwest Airlines was founded in 1926, when it began carrying air mail from the Twin Cities to Chicago on a pair of rented, open-cockpit biplanes. The company began transporting ticketed passengers almost a year later.

(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)