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.

FMI: www.stewsstripped.com