Can't Get You-Know-What With Your Clothes On
A group of retired flight attendants
from United Airlines have given their all, or at least their
altogether, to protest United's pension default of last week. The
Flight Attendants' union, the AFA, on the other hand, voted nearly
unanimously for another kind of protest: a novel strike called
CHAOS, or Create Havoc Around Our System.
Unions representing mechanics and ramp workers have also voted
to strike, but are in negotiations with United trying to forestall
such action.
The golden girls in the enclosed photo are United FAs who have,
our eyes tell us, aged well indeed (they range from 55 to 64). They
aren't exactly naked (this is, after all, a family-friendly
publication, and so is the calendar, unless you are a Taliban
family) but they're certainly showing more skin than they ever did
while flying the line --even in the era of short-short miniskirts.
They're unclothed to pose for a 2006 calendar -- a calendar that
means to make a point.
The title of the calendar is "Stewardesses Stripped (Of Their
Pension?)" and it's a humorous but pointed look at the bankrupt
airline's default on the defined-benefit pensions of rank-and-file
employees. (The executives who are running the crippled airline
into the ground were careful to shelter their own pensions,
first).
Some of the taglines on the images:
* Are your butts covered? We thought ours were too.
* Marry me, fly free - but don't expect anything from my
pension.
* Coffee, tea, or me without a pension?
* Will you be prepared if your retirement plan gets
bombed?
In order to prevent suits from the United, er, suits, whose
motto seems to be, "millions for lawyers but not one cent for
employees," the project's creator (and one of its featured
lovelies), retired FA Connie Baker, 59, took care that the airline
is not mentioned by name; and the airplane they pose with is a
snazzy, deceptively vintage-looking, Steen Skybolt -- not anything
that could be mistaken for a United airliner.
So, if you choose to associate these poor retired or
near-retirement ladies with a certain large, mismanaged airline
that has flushed all but senior mismanagement/executive pensions,
well, then, that's an association you made in your mind, that's
all.
Baker said she got the idea from a British TV film in which a
similar bunch of, shall we say, mature ladies posed for a calendar
to raise money for a good cause.
The photographer probably didn't see a new side of Baker during
the photo shoot: it was her husband, Bruce Baker. Two of the other
women in the images are retired FAs Linda Andrews, 59, and Rosemary
Esparza, 64; the remaining two are still active United flight
attendants and prefer not to be identified.
Baker has advice for any person currently in the workforce, from
the sage viewpoint of a woman of bitter experience: "[I]t can
happen to you, and you have to take care of yourself," she told the
Associated Press. "You have to take an active role in your
retirement." A similar educational message is posted on the website
of the group.
The calendar is available from the Stews' website (see below),
and a limited number of autographed calendars are available for a
few bucks extra. There's also a tee-shirt with a biplane and
"Stewardesses Stripped" on it -- wear that one and you might be
expected to live up to that.