The Unions' Challenge: Don't Lock in Temp Jobs : Labor: Timing and an eager President rescued the flight attendants, but big companies like American Airlines may have long-term advantages.

But it's becoming apparent that American's management wanted the President to step in, too. This was not a strike that CEO Robert L. Crandall had anticipated or that he could afford to endure. He hadn't counted upon the flight attendants' resolve--because he had misgauged the rage his demands had provoked.

For what Crandall was asking his attendants to do was sit by the phone and wait. Every fourth month, under management's offer, attendants would take lower wages and be on two-hour call for flights that needed a larger cabin crew. For good measure, they'd also be required to clean the cabin when the flight was completed, in return for which they'd pull down salaries starting at $14,000 and averaging $23,000 a year, with reduced health benefits.

Though he'd neglected to ask the attendants to darn the passengers' socks, Crandall had done just about everything else to incite a revolt. In the job market of the '90s, after all, many flight attendants must make a career of what once was a pass-through job. In 1968, the job tenure of attendants, on average, was 18 months; today, it's nine years. The very name of the union--the Assn. of Professional Flight Attendants--bespeaks a concern for status and permanence that should have made management think twice before adding janitorial tasks to the attendants' duties. Coupled with its demand for the semi-paid month-by-the-phone, management's offer amounted to the menialization--in status and income--of the flight-attendant career.

There's nothing exceptional, of course, about the flight attendants' plight. For the past decade, millions of U.S jobs have been reduced to part-time, low-wage, no-benefit positions. Five years ago, one of every four U.S. jobs was contingent (the term describing an independent contractor or a part-timer). Today, one in three is. As the economy goes global and unions grow ever weaker, America's becoming a nation of temps.

A land of part-timers flies at no-frill rates. Long-established national airlines, like American, have no easy way to compete with short-hop regional competitors like Southwest. A nation of part-timers doesn't fly as frequently as a middle-class majority nation, either. Crandall misread this last particular; he expanded American's fleet in the late '80s in expectation of the boom that never came. Now, his solution is to shrink his company and demand more work--more sporadically, at lower skill levels and for less pay--from his employees.

In a market like this, unions don't have a limitless range of options. Still, the union was better prepared than Crandall, with more than 90% of the attendants honoring the picket lines and the company unable to replace them quickly. Besides, management was posing the kind of challenge that most galvanizes unions. Almost every successful recent organizing drive has centered more on appeals to worker dignity than worker income.

But--unless you can strike at Thanksgiving when management has no backup plan and the President is eager to intervene on your behalf--unions in industries like airlines still play a losing hand. That's why many of them have been promoting the idea of employee buyouts, in which workers trade wage concessions for a major stake in the company. If the foreseeable trajectory for an industry is either downward or flat, the key questions become those of power and equitability: Who decides who goes and who stays? How fair are those decisions?

Not just unionists, but many institutional investors and lenders have concluded that the best airlines in these circumstances are at least partly worker-owned and -operated. Problem is, management likes to spin off its profitable divisions (like American's and United's reservations services) into separate ventures, and stick the workers with the red-ink sectors. Also, buyouts may be viable for a high-wage work force like airline pilots, but for flight attendants--a union of 20-granders--there's precious little income to swap for the shares.