MINNEAPOLIS -- Even before contract negotiators had announced a tentative agreement, 1,500 flight attendants at Northwest Airlines had received the e-mail headlined "Anger."
Jose Arturo Ibarra, a 20-year flight attendant based in San Francisco, had inside information on what the deal contained and was telling his colleagues via computer that the proposal was unacceptable. In many followup e-mails sent from his laptop computer, Ibarra outlined what he considered shortcomings of the agreement, urging them to reject it and to share the information with other flight attendants.
Ibarra's bulk e-mail crusade, and campaigns operated by rank-and-file flight attendants in Honolulu and Seattle on two other Internet sites, were a key ingredient of a grassroots campaign that led to last week's overwhelming rejection of the proposed deal.
"Technology has changed all the fundamental ground rules," said Dana Hansen, a seven-year Northwest flight attendant from Detroit who participated in the ad-hoc campaign against ratification. "It's no longer about pounding the pavement and waving strike signs around."
Internet forums and bulk e-mail distributions are ideal communication tools for geographically scattered airline employees, Hansen said. They are inexpensive and can put a small number of activists on equal footing with a powerful organization, such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, when it comes to rousing the masses.
At Northwest, 11,000 flight attendants are dispersed over 10 airport bases in the United States and work on more than 400 different airplanes at varying times of the day. In addition to Ibarra's e-mail messages, Seattle-based flight attendant Andy Damis oversees a Web site devoted to obtaining an industry-leading contract for Northwest flight attendants.
Damis said a majority of Northwest's flight attendants undoubtedly would have ratified the tentative agreement if there had been no cyber-message to counter the endorsements of Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa and Teamsters Local 2000 President Billie Davenport.
The union conducted a road show in support of the deal and widely distributed videotape copies of show highlights. "We couldn't afford mailings and we had no addresses," Damis said.
Damis started his Web site independently, but he quickly collaborated with Ibarra and fellow Northwest flight attendant Kevin Griffin, Honolulu-based moderator of an interactive forum. Griffin opened an Internet forum for Northwest's flight attendants in May after attending a union meeting in Los Angeles that he felt offered little insight into the bargaining process.
The forum hosts a live chat among flight attendants. "People were clueless," Griffin said. "It just seemed to be a good idea to start an information exchange."
Based on contributions from forum participants, Griffin compiled "lowlights" of the tentative agreement. He has shared the lengthy feature with Ibarra and Damis.
"People were starved for information," said Ibarra, who uses his e-mail list to promote both Web sites.
However, Honolulu-based flight attendant Ashley Ann McNeely said the rank-and-file protest over the tentative agreement did not grow solely from computers. There were also informational meetings led by opponents of the pact. "The Internet put the information out there," McNeely said. "But it took people to receive it and carry it on."
