
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, November 23, 1993                   TAG: 9311230160
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S NO HOLIDAY BEING A FLIGHT ATTENDANT

The plane is jammed, a baby is wailing, and you've got an unbreakable date in Miami or Detroit or Kansas City, when a huge squall blows over the tarmac, delaying Flight Whatever indefinitely.

That's when someone - maybe you - lets loose on the nearest flight attendant. He or she might want to respond, "Lighten up. You can't control the weather." But coping cheerfully with angry passengers is part of the job and one of its many hidden strains.

Wages, work rules and benefits were the pragmatic issues behind the strike that ended Monday. But for many, the walkout was equally about recognition and the sense that compensation reflects the degree to which they're valued - or not valued - by their employer. And that's what makes American's capitulation so sweet.

"The first question I heard at a rally was, `We're just flight attendants. What kind of impact can we have?' " said Patrick Hancock, a negotiator for the 21,000-member Association of Professional Flight Attendants.

"I don't think I'll ever hear that question again," Hancock said, as cheers went up in the background at the Euless, Texas, union office. "I think we can honestly say that . . . flight attendants will be forever transformed in feeling that they're just a doormat."

Starting flight attendants earn about $14,500 a year, which runs out quickly in the major cities where many are based. The median salary is $23,000, which doesn't go far when you're a single parent.

"Flight attendants have a hard time making the public understand our issues without sounding like we're whining," said Josephine Barnes, 42, a longtime American employee. "We don't command the kind of respect the pilots get. Ours are supposed to be glamour jobs."

No question, the job has its glamorous side. But it's far from nonstop tickets to Paris for lunch. The down hours in anonymous airport concourses can be lonely, nights away from home long. The rates of job-related injury and illness are above average, the jet lag incessant. It's skin parched by altitude and peanuts for dinner, backs strained by 200-pound beverage carts and marriages sometimes strained by constant separation. Though flight attendants generally work only about 75 hours a month, they are away from home an estimated 3 1/2 hours for every one on the job. And the hours are getting longer.

American Airlines says the squeeze is simple economic reality. The deregulated industry, which has lost billions of dollars in recent years, has been forced to cut back on payroll and overall operating costs to compete against upstart, no-frills airlines.

In this economy, some might say flight attendants are lucky to have work at all, that the strikers should find something else if they don't like working for the airlines. The problem is that they do. They love the freedom and flexibility, the chance for travel, the camaraderie and constantly changing scenery.

But "we feel that we live in a corporate dictatorship. As the unions eroded in the '80s, the companies began giving us unreasonable choices - which as far as I'm concerned are no choices at all," said Candis Mason, 46, who has worked 25 years in the airline industry.

by CNB