Vicious Truths – Delta F/A e-mail Newsletter # 4                 May 29, 2001

“WACKY” IS TOO WEAK A WORD…

            Here’s another beaut from the gaggle of pro-afa F/As e-mail network.  In a meandering diatribe that is intended to trash Delta, but is more likely to convince F/As she has bats in her belfry, she says: 

From as far back as 1989, I was begging management to not allow customs to tell translators that we had hired that they MUST translate what was being told to them by Custom’s [sic] officials.  They were being told back as far as then [by customs officials] that “you tell them if they don’t cooperate, that we are going to take them out back and shoot them.”  Our translators used to come up from customs crying because they didn’t want to say things like that to our passengers.  When I complained to management, I was told to mind my own business, and that we were to cooperate fully with customs. 

We don’t doubt that she was told to mind her own business after making such a wacky claim. This is the same genius we quoted in our 38^th letter: 

“Would you like to be a guest on the 60-Minutes or 20/20 investigation that may be produced and aired concerning Delta’s employment practices…Would you like to sit there as a long list of flight attendants who were harassed by their supervisors and then killed themselves or died on a lay-over because of the intimidation and threats to work, are read out loud with pictures of the dead shown on camera?” 

It really takes a fertile mind to conclude that customs was mandating that people be told to cooperate or we  were “going to take them out back and shoot them.”    It takes an even more fertile mind to come up with “a long list of flight attendants who…killed themselves or died on a lay-over.”   Her mind is obviously very fertile – but only in the agricultural sense. 

This kind of drivel is so preposterous we’d simply laugh it off, were it not for one thing.  The people taking the lead in the afa’s campaign are almost certain to end up in union leadership if the afa prevails.  Would anyone want someone like this calling the shots for them?  

GENERAL CUSTER REVISITED 

In e-Truths #1 we quoted a self-proclaimed spokesperson (“General Custer”) complaining about being asked “to do things I am not supposed to have to do if they are short people or the weather gets bad.” The afa repeated most of his silly drivel in a recent flyer, editing it so it didn’t sound quite so absurd, but retaining this comment which we referred to as “the union version of post graduate economic ignorance.”  In light of that, you may find an e-mail we’ve just received interesting: 

I asked my husband, who is a pilot with Southwest, if their flight attendants ever get jerked around in irregular operations and made to fly overtime, etc. and he said ABSOLUTELY!!! They get jerked around ANY time the company feels they HAVE to do that!!! (And so do pilots!).  Unions don’t protect us from that…they can’t just shut down and leave pax stranded. 

Other unions don’t seem to object to taking care of pax, just the afa. She went on to say: 

…also, just commuted home on Southwest and the flight attendants working that flight asked me if a union vote was up and coming…they said “DON’T DO IT!!!!”  All 3 came and told me how unhappy they were with theirs and they are STUCK with them!!!   

That brings to mind comments we received from another Delta F/A a while back: 

My crew shared a van the other night to the hotel with a SW crew.  On of my F/As was pregnant as well as one of theirs.  They (the two preggers) started swapping maternity benefit info and the SW crew almost fainted when they heard how good ours is.  Did you know that (in order to get full pay or ANY pay) THEY MUST FLY UP UNTIL 1 WEEK BEFORE THEIR DELIVERY DATE!!  When our girl said – Oh, so you’d just have to use disability?? They looked at us like “What’s that???”  

DON’T SHUT THE DOOR ON [WHOSE] FUTURE? 

            In a flyer (prophetically?) called “FINAL Boarding Call,” the afa tries yet again to frighten F/As into joining and concludes by saying:  “It doesn’t have to be that way.  You can take control over your future.  And take a giant step towards putting worries about job security, benefits, retirement, scheduling and pay behind you.”  Are we supposed to be worried because: 

RIP UP THOSE CARDS!!!

Lynne Atwood, IAH 610, Editor    ¨    P.O. Box 19484, Houston, TX 77224    ¨    atwood@hal-pc.org