79 year old FA fired by Delta
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79 year old FA fired by Delta
The age caught my interest as I've seen a good many 'senior' flight attendants on Delta recently - all professional and provided excellent service. The salary also was an eye opener. In conversation with one, he said he retired from his non-aviation job and just wanted to fly.
https://www.foxnews.com/travel/delta...al-milk-carton
https://www.foxnews.com/travel/delta...al-milk-carton
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The age caught my interest as I've seen a good many 'senior' flight attendants on Delta recently - all professional and provided excellent service. The salary also was an eye opener. In conversation with one, he said he retired from his non-aviation job and just wanted to fly.
https://www.foxnews.com/travel/delta...al-milk-carton
https://www.foxnews.com/travel/delta...al-milk-carton
What a ****ty end to what appears to have been a good and loyal career.
All of that quoted figure wasn't likely direct income from flying and profit sharing. After age 70, she was obligated to take Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from her IRA or 401K and her Delta pension (even if she is still working). Also likely getting her Social Security income. And perhaps she has some other sources of income.
Many very senior F/As are drawing 4 checks. How the media was able to come up with that total income figure is puzzling since that's none of their business and has absolutely nothing to do with the story.
She made a mistake and has been punished for it.
Many very senior F/As are drawing 4 checks. How the media was able to come up with that total income figure is puzzling since that's none of their business and has absolutely nothing to do with the story.
She made a mistake and has been punished for it.
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Did she? At least according to the linked article, there is no other proof than statements from envious peers who allegedly wanted her out, reporting to a company who would be happy to comply with the accusations for financial reasons.
Do you have more information?
Do you have more information?
I should've said she apparently made a mistake as I have no further info on this event.
I do rather doubt the theory that senior F/As are target for elimination by the company or their fellow F/As. There are ~250 F/As with 50 years or more of service. If they're being targeted for elimination, someone has a lot of work to do.
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I always love to hear about elderly people who are still enjoying going to work. Given that flight attendants have quite physical jobs, particularly in case of an accident, makes it all the more impressive that she was still working for them at 79. What a shame.
Ida Gomez Llanos, 57 years of dedication and service to aviation.
What an amazing lady! I salute you!
Chief Purser/Cabin Crew Director Ida, all the very best wishes for your retirement!
What an amazing lady! I salute you!
Chief Purser/Cabin Crew Director Ida, all the very best wishes for your retirement!
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Ida should have known after 50 years that Delta and just about all US airlines have a ZERO tolerance policy when it comes to theft, There a lot more on other sites regarding this lady's work habits. Her assertion that DL wanted her to go because of her high earnings is absurd on the face of it.
RMDs at age 70?
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Not saying that this was Delta's plan, but unfortunately, age related dismissals have been common practice in many companies. Sad to think that it might still continue.
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There was a time, long log ago when stealing liquor minitures or headset money was a pretty common practice and most co worker looked the other way, but times have changed and all employees are well aware of it. No excuses anymore. Being senior does not give you a free pass.
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There was a time, long log ago when stealing liquor minitures or headset money was a pretty common practice and most co worker looked the other way, but times have changed and all employees are well aware of it. No excuses anymore. Being senior does not give you a free pass.
From three decades ago another case with very similar issues:
Only a Minor Theft but Airline and Attendant Agree It’s Now a Major Case
By BEVERLY BEYETTE
[Los Angeles] Times Staff WriterApril 10, 1988 12 AM
After more than 24 years as a Trans World Airlines flight attendant, Elizabeth Rich was fired. The charge: theft of company property. The goods: four leftover half-pint cartons of milk and a TWA toilet kit issued to a New York-to-Paris passenger who left it behind in a seat pocket.
Rich is not disputing that she took the items--"TWA’s garbage,” she calls them--nor does she condone theft. But, in this case, she believes she was targeted as a scapegoat because of her activism during a 1986 flight attendants’ strike and her criticism of cost-cutting tactics by board chairman Carl Icahn, the multimillionaire corporate raider who took over TWA early in 1986.
Rich, 53, contends that she and other senior flight attendants who have been recalled to duty since the strike ended have been “harassed” and “spied on” by management personnel intent on replacing them. TWA insists it is an open-and-shut case of petty theft.
Whatever the interpretation, Rich’s case has mushroomed from a small-scale case of employee theft into a national cause celebre, complete with a sympathetic segment on CBS’ “60 Minutes” show. In the process, her story has taken on the trappings of a union crusade, in which the New York-based Independent Federation of Flight Attendants accuses TWA management of the “McDonald-izing” of flight attendants, with fast turnover as the goal. It has also become the tale of a bitter personal feud between Rich and her accuser, a co-worker, and of lingering union resentment against the airline and its flamboyant new owner.
Rich believes she is fighting not only for herself but for her fellow strikers, most of whom, she says, “don’t want to fight because they can’t afford to lose their jobs again.” Of the 3,800 who have not been called back, she says, “The majority have not committed themselves to another career. They want to go back to flying.”
Mark Buckstein, TWA senior vice president and general counsel, categorically denies any harassment of former strikers. In fact, he says the company has done a careful statistical study and has “found a dramatically larger portion of the new hires have been either disciplined, suspended or terminated than the strikers. There’s absolutely no truth to the suggestion that we are out to get anybody like Liz Rich. It is totally false.”
The Liz Rich issue, says Victoria Frankovich, president of the flight attendants union, is “just part of a bigger problem” which she identifies as “pressure for the corporations to find a way to rid themselves of the more senior and more costly work force.” Frankovich is not excusing Rich’s actions. “Liz did not use good judgment in taking milk off the airliner,” she says. “No employee should walk off with an employer possession, whether it’s garbage or not.” But, she adds, in view of her “perfect work record,” Rich received disproportionately “harsh treatment"--yes, she was a scapegoat.
“I have to tell you honestly,” Icahn responds, “until the last few weeks I never heard of Liz Rich, let alone targeted her.”
“That’s also true for me,” says TWA President D. Joseph Corr, who adds, “we try to go out of our way to make the people coming back welcome.”
Rich’s troubles began Oct. 6 when TWA Flight 800 touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris about 6:30 a.m., after a six-hour flight from New York. “Every flight is understaffed,” Rich says, this one no exception. A “floater,” she was working several cabins of the L1011.
TWA flight attendants, including Rich, had struck the airline in March, 1986, in response to what the union saw as Icahn’s effort to recoup $320 million to help cover takeover costs by imposing cuts on employees. The cuts included a 40% wage and benefits cut for 5,200 flight attendants, 85% of whom were women, one-third of them 40 or older, with an average 15 years’ service with TWA and an average salary of $30,000-$35,000, Frankovich says. New hires are being brought in at $12,000, she adds.
The strike lasted 72 days, the union capitulating rather than see wholesale replacement of the work force. Two years later, 3,800 members of the pre-strike work force are still not back on the job while 2,100 flight attendants hired during the strike to replace the strikers are on active status.
By law, the company must cease hiring from the outside and start rehiring, by seniority, from a preferential list that includes all of the former strikers, until that list is depleted. To date, a total of 1,400 flight attendants have been rehired, according to a union spokeswoman. Rich had been called back to full-time employment in April, 1987, after almost 14 months off the job.
Her flight to Paris in October arrived almost an hour early and, between food service and selling of boutique items, she says, there had been no time for her to eat the crew meal provided. At flight’s end, cleaning a shelf in the galley, Rich spotted the surplus milk. “I was about to sweep it off the shelf into a garbage bag,” she recalls, when another attendant, a new hire, said, “Don’t. I hate French milk. I want that.” What a good idea, Rich thought, placing four containers of milk in each of two trash-and-stash bags. During the flight she had snagged a fingernail and, before leaving the aircraft, she threw into her bag the unclaimed amenities kit containing an emery board.
As they deplaned, Rich spotted TWA superintendent Kenneth Peterson at the gate. The word spread quickly among the crew--"Crew kit search. If you have anything, get rid of it.” Rich knew the company had been concerned about duty-free items such as Cartier watches disappearing but, she recalls, “I wasn’t the least bit concerned.”
In moments, though, she says she realized that “I had been set up, and I became enraged.” Seizing the garbage bag and its contents, Peterson told her he was removing her from flight status and ordered her to report for a hearing the next day in his office in Manhattan.
“And so he took possession of my garbage,” Rich says. “I could hardly keep a straight face.”
Meanwhile, Rich says, other crew members were jettisoning items they’d taken from the aircraft--"Somebody had a Coke, somebody had a juice. When you’ve had 40% cut out of your pay, people take juice.”
Rich does not dispute TWA’s legal right to fire her for taking the milk, acknowledging a regulation stating that anyone taking anything, including disposables, is subject to instant dismissal. Until this incident, she contends, she would have interpreted that to mean “paper napkins and Styrofoam cups.” She says, “Milk is not reusable. Milk is garbage.”
(There would have been no problem, Peterson testified at a New York State Labor Department hearing, had she drunk the milk during the flight, as attendants may have an unlimited quantity so long as passengers are not deprived.)
As for that toilet kit, Rich contends that cleaning crews routinely take those left behind, used and unused. Further, she has stated in testimony, “Anything that has been given to a passenger already is no longer company property.” If TWA wanted to make an example of someone, she believes, she was perfect, with a record of union activism that “would not endear me to them.” She had led a lie-in at TWA’s Manhattan ticket office during the strike. Earlier, she had fought battles for now-defunct Stewardesses for Women’s Rights.
So now, her wings clipped, she was being returned to New York in disgrace--but also in style. First class on TWA. She notes with a smile, “They gave me two (amenities) kits.”
The contraband cartons of milk were on Peterson’s desk when Rich reported for her hearing. She had rehearsed a little speech, she says, about how TWA had paid her for 24 years to make people happy and how she had wanted to leave “while I have good memories of my job.” And she requested retirement.
The good memories are many, she is quick to say. In fact, she wrote a book, “Flying High,” published in 1970, that for the most part extolled the joys of being a flight attendant.
But her retirement plans hit a snag when the TWA legal department sent to the union a demand that, as a condition of retiring with full benefits, she abandon her claim to $30,000 in back pay--the money she would have received had she been reinstated at the end of the strike rather than waiting an additional 14 months to be rehired. Rich refused and withdrew her application. “I’m not going to pay $30,000 for a quart of milk,” she says.
(On March 21 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that about 450 TWA flight attendants, Rich included, who contended they were illegally deprived of their jobs are entitled to reinstatement with back pay and Rich believes she, too, will get that money, despite being subsequently fired for theft. In the meantime, Rich is getting unemployment insurance as a result of a New York State Labor Department ruling that she was guilty of “at most an error of judgment” and not of gross misconduct in taking the items. TWA is appealing that decision.)
After withdrawing her retirement application, Rich said, “The only thing I was interested in now was clearing my name, getting my back pay and going back on the line” with high visibility.
She vowed, “I’m not going to stay quiet about this.”
She hasn’t. In an interview, she accused TWA of having a “Gestapo goon squad” maliciously dogging the footsteps of recalled flight attendants. All TWA attendants have been working without a contract since March, 1986, and recalled workers, she says, are being routinely suspended for offenses such as “not smiling enough” or refusing to talk to non-union hires, referred to by Rich as “scabettes.” She calls it “a poisonous atmosphere.”
“That absolutely is not true,” says Corr of the charges of harassment. As best he knows, he says, a policy of discrimination toward senior attendants “has never even been a subject of management discussion” and TWA makes recalled attendants “as welcome as possible.”
TWA officials acknowledge, however, that Rich was not netted in some random search operation but, rather, that they were alerted to an alleged pattern of theft by a tipster.
That tipster, they acknowledge, was Henriette (Penny) Parker, a veteran TWA flight attendant. Rich is locked with Parker and her husband, a retired TWA pilot, in a civil suit and countersuit over who has the right to purchase a co-op apartment in Manhattan, which Rich occupies.
Accusing Penny Parker of “pure viciousness” in charging her with thievery to TWA, Rich last month filed a $7-million defamation of character suit against both Parkers, which the Parkers are contesting.
Rich has also responded with public allegations about Ms. Parker, producing among other evidence a disciplinary letter from TWA’s files dated Dec. 10, 1966, which expressed TWA’s concern about “repeated instances” of Parker issuing bad checks. The Parkers have in turn filed a $20-million countercomplaint against Rich, which Rich is contesting.
What infuriates Rich most is that TWA, she says, is underwriting the Parkers’ countersuit.
A highly placed TWA source explained that when the airline asked Ms. Parker for permission to use her allegations concerning Rich’s alleged thievery in preparing for the “60 Minutes” segment, it agreed to Parker’s attorneys’ demand that TWA indemnify her for any legal action relating to the incident. However, the source said TWA and its lawyers had no intention of becoming “pawns” in the Rich-Parker dispute.
Buckstein puts it this way, “If these two ladies want to engage in a battle . . . I don’t want to be in the middle.”
Jack Parker, asked in his wife’s absence to comment on her role as informant, said, “I don’t see what possible good this can do either my wife or myself. What’s in it for us? Trouble.
“There’s a libel suit going on . . . . You won’t get a quote from us.”
But papers filed as part of the Parker’s countercomplaint state that “in early September, 1987, defendant Henriette Parker met with Donald Fleming, TWA’s manager of In-Flight Services for the Eastern Region, at which time she told Mr. Fleming that she believed that the plaintiff (Rich) had been stealing TWA property for years.” During that conversation, the papers state, Henriette Parker also told Fleming that on a visit to Rich’s apartment in April of 1986 she saw a dozen or so toilet kits stashed in a closet and believed Rich was giving them as gifts to employees of the apartment building.
Rich dismisses the above as ludicrous, noting that she has “hundreds” of these kits, issued to her on 1,000 or more flights as a “deadhead” (off-duty attendant) or pass passenger, and has no reason to steal any.
Rich says Icahn telephoned her sometime after the “60 Minutes” broadcast: She says she told him, “You have to get out of my private life or I’m going to go to your stockholders and tell them you were involved in my personal lawsuit.”
“I never would have been in this libel litigation,” she reasons, “if it hadn’t been for this apartment litigation, which has motivated the Parkers from the very beginning. It’s one and the same thing. Both suits will be combined. Therefore, TWA will be financing the Parkers’ apartment litigation. It’s inappropriate.”
If TWA will agree to extricate itself, she says, “I’ll be happy to settle. I can’t back out while they’re financing a $20-million libel suit against me.” Alternatively, she suggests, TWA could also pay her legal fees in her dispute with the Parkers and “the loser will pay back TWA for whatever they invested in this little Ping-Pong game.”
As for the great milk caper, Rich says the real question is not whether the milk was stolen or simply salvaged but “why I didn’t have time to eat.”
According to the union’s Frankovich, TWA flight attendants are now required to work an average of 80 to 85 in-air hours a month, up from the pre-strike average of 75. Like Rich, she says, they frequently have no time to sit down for a meal in flight. “When (since deregulation) you’re selling a ticket for $200,” she says, you have people jam-packed in cabins,” and TWA now assigns only one flight attendant for every 50 seats.
However, according to Buckstein, “Working conditions have not changed dramatically (since the strike) and we certainly will always make sure that conditions will not affect the health and well-being of our flight attendants or our passengers.” Concerning the additional five to 10 in-air hours a month alleged by Frankovich, he said, “I gotta tell you frankly, I don’t know how that jeopardizes anybody’s health or safety.”
“All we hear from the new hires,” Icahn responds, “is they want to keep their jobs. If conditions are so bad, how come almost 100% of the recalls come back and only a small number have left? The ones I’m talking to tell me everything is fine.”
Borden stated on “60 Minutes” that Rich was fired for no other reason than the theft of the milk and the kit, and that a company with 30,000 employees must “view any theft as important.”
However, Frankovich cites other “wrist slap” offenses for which she says senior attendants have been dismissed since Icahn took over, such as sending a “Boycott TWA” postcard to a friend (the union has an ongoing boycott campaign). (That attendant was reinstated with back pay as the result of arbitration, according to a union spokeswoman.) One senior woman was fired, Frankovich says, when accused of telling a passenger she “hopes Icahn burns in hell” (a charge the attendant has denied); that case is pending arbitration.
Buckstein told CBS’s Harry Reasoner that there is “nothing that I’m aware of” other than the theft that would have caused TWA to dismiss Rich after 24 years’ service.
Later, he told The Times, “We probably have spent more time on this topic than we’d like to.” Charging “distortions” in the television segment, he said, “The impression created was that Ms. Rich is going to lose her pension benefits. That absolutely is not true.”
“What I care about,” Rich says, is “denying me what I’ve worked 25 years for over a quart of milk.” That includes her unlimited lifetime TWA pass and company-paid life insurance and medical benefits, which she says she will lose if her firing is upheld, and back pay from Oct. 7--when she was taken off the payroll--until a settlement is reached. She also wants $118,000 as a lump sum rather than in monthly stipends after normal retirement age.
Asked what TWA is prepared to do to reach a settlement with Rich, Buckstein said, “I don’t want to negotiate a settlement with you. I don’t believe in airing grievances or issues in the press.”
But, he emphasized, Rich was “absolutely not” singled out as a symbol of the people TWA would like to get rid of.
There is “a fair amount of precedent” both within the company and throughout the industry, Buckstein says, for the firing of Rich.
If she will settle, he says, “We will allow her to take her pension benefits in a lump sum” and “will not insist on her waiving her right” to her back-pay claim. He emphasized that the company made this offer prior to public airing of the case on “60 Minutes.”
Icahn says, “Everyone in the airline knows they can always call me. It’s very strange she didn’t call me when she felt she had been unfairly treated . . . at that time, general counsel or I would certainly have given her the back pay claim if she had just called us. I would certainly have given her both things she wants.”
And now? “Why should it be different?” Icahn asks. “I believe this would definitely be our policy.”
Rich says, “All I can say is, I wish I’d called him, too. I didn’t call him because he is responsible for his management policies and management has been treating me with unrelenting maliciousness. I thought they were carrying out his mandate.”
A TWA source suggests, “It appears at this point she or her lawyers feel they can make a big fee out of this.”
What does Rich want from TWA now? Nothing less than “complete exoneration,” she says, an admission from management that a mistake was made. And, she says, “I want my job back.”
Rich also hopes her high profile will give a boost to the union’s current industrywide effort to get certification by the FAA, much as pilots are licensed. Certification, she says, would guarantee uniform training standards, legal limitations on hours and safeguarded rights such as “a meal period, break periods, a place to sit” in flight--"We want this job to be a career.”
She adds, “There’s a connection between morale and safety. Every airline that’s treating its front-line workers as if they’re disposable pieces of machinery is playing with real fire.”
Rich intends to keep making noise. “I’m not a mouse,” she says, “and I hate being bullied.” If TWA won’t settle on her terms, she says, “I will wait until arbitration” and “I’m going to win that arbitration. I’ll get my job back, too.”
But would Icahn give her back her job? “Under no circumstances would she get the job back,” he says, adding that it is TWA policy that “stealing, no matter what it is, cannot be condoned. . . .”
Adds Corr, “We can’t have two sets of standards, one for those who complain, one for those who don’t.”
Rich is not disputing that she took the items--"TWA’s garbage,” she calls them--nor does she condone theft. But, in this case, she believes she was targeted as a scapegoat because of her activism during a 1986 flight attendants’ strike and her criticism of cost-cutting tactics by board chairman Carl Icahn, the multimillionaire corporate raider who took over TWA early in 1986.
Rich, 53, contends that she and other senior flight attendants who have been recalled to duty since the strike ended have been “harassed” and “spied on” by management personnel intent on replacing them. TWA insists it is an open-and-shut case of petty theft.
Whatever the interpretation, Rich’s case has mushroomed from a small-scale case of employee theft into a national cause celebre, complete with a sympathetic segment on CBS’ “60 Minutes” show. In the process, her story has taken on the trappings of a union crusade, in which the New York-based Independent Federation of Flight Attendants accuses TWA management of the “McDonald-izing” of flight attendants, with fast turnover as the goal. It has also become the tale of a bitter personal feud between Rich and her accuser, a co-worker, and of lingering union resentment against the airline and its flamboyant new owner.
Rich believes she is fighting not only for herself but for her fellow strikers, most of whom, she says, “don’t want to fight because they can’t afford to lose their jobs again.” Of the 3,800 who have not been called back, she says, “The majority have not committed themselves to another career. They want to go back to flying.”
Mark Buckstein, TWA senior vice president and general counsel, categorically denies any harassment of former strikers. In fact, he says the company has done a careful statistical study and has “found a dramatically larger portion of the new hires have been either disciplined, suspended or terminated than the strikers. There’s absolutely no truth to the suggestion that we are out to get anybody like Liz Rich. It is totally false.”
The Liz Rich issue, says Victoria Frankovich, president of the flight attendants union, is “just part of a bigger problem” which she identifies as “pressure for the corporations to find a way to rid themselves of the more senior and more costly work force.”
We've got some ideas for you, and they're far better than a neck pillow.
“I have to tell you honestly,” Icahn responds, “until the last few weeks I never heard of Liz Rich, let alone targeted her.”
“That’s also true for me,” says TWA President D. Joseph Corr, who adds, “we try to go out of our way to make the people coming back welcome.”
Rich’s troubles began Oct. 6 when TWA Flight 800 touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris about 6:30 a.m., after a six-hour flight from New York. “Every flight is understaffed,” Rich says, this one no exception. A “floater,” she was working several cabins of the L1011.
TWA flight attendants, including Rich, had struck the airline in March, 1986, in response to what the union saw as Icahn’s effort to recoup $320 million to help cover takeover costs by imposing cuts on employees. The cuts included a 40% wage and benefits cut for 5,200 flight attendants, 85% of whom were women, one-third of them 40 or older, with an average 15 years’ service with TWA and an average salary of $30,000-$35,000, Frankovich says. New hires are being brought in at $12,000, she adds.
The strike lasted 72 days, the union capitulating rather than see wholesale replacement of the work force. Two years later, 3,800 members of the pre-strike work force are still not back on the job while 2,100 flight attendants hired during the strike to replace the strikers are on active status.
By law, the company must cease hiring from the outside and start rehiring, by seniority, from a preferential list that includes all of the former strikers, until that list is depleted. To date, a total of 1,400 flight attendants have been rehired, according to a union spokeswoman. Rich had been called back to full-time employment in April, 1987, after almost 14 months off the job.
Her flight to Paris in October arrived almost an hour early and, between food service and selling of boutique items, she says, there had been no time for her to eat the crew meal provided. At flight’s end, cleaning a shelf in the galley, Rich spotted the surplus milk. “I was about to sweep it off the shelf into a garbage bag,” she recalls, when another attendant, a new hire, said, “Don’t. I hate French milk. I want that.” What a good idea, Rich thought, placing four containers of milk in each of two trash-and-stash bags. During the flight she had snagged a fingernail and, before leaving the aircraft, she threw into her bag the unclaimed amenities kit containing an emery board.
As they deplaned, Rich spotted TWA superintendent Kenneth Peterson at the gate. The word spread quickly among the crew--"Crew kit search. If you have anything, get rid of it.” Rich knew the company had been concerned about duty-free items such as Cartier watches disappearing but, she recalls, “I wasn’t the least bit concerned.”
In moments, though, she says she realized that “I had been set up, and I became enraged.” Seizing the garbage bag and its contents, Peterson told her he was removing her from flight status and ordered her to report for a hearing the next day in his office in Manhattan.
“And so he took possession of my garbage,” Rich says. “I could hardly keep a straight face.”
Meanwhile, Rich says, other crew members were jettisoning items they’d taken from the aircraft--"Somebody had a Coke, somebody had a juice. When you’ve had 40% cut out of your pay, people take juice.”
Rich does not dispute TWA’s legal right to fire her for taking the milk, acknowledging a regulation stating that anyone taking anything, including disposables, is subject to instant dismissal. Until this incident, she contends, she would have interpreted that to mean “paper napkins and Styrofoam cups.” She says, “Milk is not reusable. Milk is garbage.”
(There would have been no problem, Peterson testified at a New York State Labor Department hearing, had she drunk the milk during the flight, as attendants may have an unlimited quantity so long as passengers are not deprived.)
As for that toilet kit, Rich contends that cleaning crews routinely take those left behind, used and unused. Further, she has stated in testimony, “Anything that has been given to a passenger already is no longer company property.” If TWA wanted to make an example of someone, she believes, she was perfect, with a record of union activism that “would not endear me to them.” She had led a lie-in at TWA’s Manhattan ticket office during the strike. Earlier, she had fought battles for now-defunct Stewardesses for Women’s Rights.
So now, her wings clipped, she was being returned to New York in disgrace--but also in style. First class on TWA. She notes with a smile, “They gave me two (amenities) kits.”
The contraband cartons of milk were on Peterson’s desk when Rich reported for her hearing. She had rehearsed a little speech, she says, about how TWA had paid her for 24 years to make people happy and how she had wanted to leave “while I have good memories of my job.” And she requested retirement.
The good memories are many, she is quick to say. In fact, she wrote a book, “Flying High,” published in 1970, that for the most part extolled the joys of being a flight attendant.
But her retirement plans hit a snag when the TWA legal department sent to the union a demand that, as a condition of retiring with full benefits, she abandon her claim to $30,000 in back pay--the money she would have received had she been reinstated at the end of the strike rather than waiting an additional 14 months to be rehired. Rich refused and withdrew her application. “I’m not going to pay $30,000 for a quart of milk,” she says.
(On March 21 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that about 450 TWA flight attendants, Rich included, who contended they were illegally deprived of their jobs are entitled to reinstatement with back pay and Rich believes she, too, will get that money, despite being subsequently fired for theft. In the meantime, Rich is getting unemployment insurance as a result of a New York State Labor Department ruling that she was guilty of “at most an error of judgment” and not of gross misconduct in taking the items. TWA is appealing that decision.)
After withdrawing her retirement application, Rich said, “The only thing I was interested in now was clearing my name, getting my back pay and going back on the line” with high visibility.
She vowed, “I’m not going to stay quiet about this.”
She hasn’t. In an interview, she accused TWA of having a “Gestapo goon squad” maliciously dogging the footsteps of recalled flight attendants. All TWA attendants have been working without a contract since March, 1986, and recalled workers, she says, are being routinely suspended for offenses such as “not smiling enough” or refusing to talk to non-union hires, referred to by Rich as “scabettes.” She calls it “a poisonous atmosphere.”
“That absolutely is not true,” says Corr of the charges of harassment. As best he knows, he says, a policy of discrimination toward senior attendants “has never even been a subject of management discussion” and TWA makes recalled attendants “as welcome as possible.”
TWA officials acknowledge, however, that Rich was not netted in some random search operation but, rather, that they were alerted to an alleged pattern of theft by a tipster.
That tipster, they acknowledge, was Henriette (Penny) Parker, a veteran TWA flight attendant. Rich is locked with Parker and her husband, a retired TWA pilot, in a civil suit and countersuit over who has the right to purchase a co-op apartment in Manhattan, which Rich occupies.
Accusing Penny Parker of “pure viciousness” in charging her with thievery to TWA, Rich last month filed a $7-million defamation of character suit against both Parkers, which the Parkers are contesting.
Rich has also responded with public allegations about Ms. Parker, producing among other evidence a disciplinary letter from TWA’s files dated Dec. 10, 1966, which expressed TWA’s concern about “repeated instances” of Parker issuing bad checks. The Parkers have in turn filed a $20-million countercomplaint against Rich, which Rich is contesting.
What infuriates Rich most is that TWA, she says, is underwriting the Parkers’ countersuit.
A highly placed TWA source explained that when the airline asked Ms. Parker for permission to use her allegations concerning Rich’s alleged thievery in preparing for the “60 Minutes” segment, it agreed to Parker’s attorneys’ demand that TWA indemnify her for any legal action relating to the incident. However, the source said TWA and its lawyers had no intention of becoming “pawns” in the Rich-Parker dispute.
Buckstein puts it this way, “If these two ladies want to engage in a battle . . . I don’t want to be in the middle.”
Jack Parker, asked in his wife’s absence to comment on her role as informant, said, “I don’t see what possible good this can do either my wife or myself. What’s in it for us? Trouble.
“There’s a libel suit going on . . . . You won’t get a quote from us.”
But papers filed as part of the Parker’s countercomplaint state that “in early September, 1987, defendant Henriette Parker met with Donald Fleming, TWA’s manager of In-Flight Services for the Eastern Region, at which time she told Mr. Fleming that she believed that the plaintiff (Rich) had been stealing TWA property for years.” During that conversation, the papers state, Henriette Parker also told Fleming that on a visit to Rich’s apartment in April of 1986 she saw a dozen or so toilet kits stashed in a closet and believed Rich was giving them as gifts to employees of the apartment building.
Rich dismisses the above as ludicrous, noting that she has “hundreds” of these kits, issued to her on 1,000 or more flights as a “deadhead” (off-duty attendant) or pass passenger, and has no reason to steal any.
Rich says Icahn telephoned her sometime after the “60 Minutes” broadcast: She says she told him, “You have to get out of my private life or I’m going to go to your stockholders and tell them you were involved in my personal lawsuit.”
“I never would have been in this libel litigation,” she reasons, “if it hadn’t been for this apartment litigation, which has motivated the Parkers from the very beginning. It’s one and the same thing. Both suits will be combined. Therefore, TWA will be financing the Parkers’ apartment litigation. It’s inappropriate.”
If TWA will agree to extricate itself, she says, “I’ll be happy to settle. I can’t back out while they’re financing a $20-million libel suit against me.” Alternatively, she suggests, TWA could also pay her legal fees in her dispute with the Parkers and “the loser will pay back TWA for whatever they invested in this little Ping-Pong game.”
As for the great milk caper, Rich says the real question is not whether the milk was stolen or simply salvaged but “why I didn’t have time to eat.”
According to the union’s Frankovich, TWA flight attendants are now required to work an average of 80 to 85 in-air hours a month, up from the pre-strike average of 75. Like Rich, she says, they frequently have no time to sit down for a meal in flight. “When (since deregulation) you’re selling a ticket for $200,” she says, you have people jam-packed in cabins,” and TWA now assigns only one flight attendant for every 50 seats.
However, according to Buckstein, “Working conditions have not changed dramatically (since the strike) and we certainly will always make sure that conditions will not affect the health and well-being of our flight attendants or our passengers.” Concerning the additional five to 10 in-air hours a month alleged by Frankovich, he said, “I gotta tell you frankly, I don’t know how that jeopardizes anybody’s health or safety.”
“All we hear from the new hires,” Icahn responds, “is they want to keep their jobs. If conditions are so bad, how come almost 100% of the recalls come back and only a small number have left? The ones I’m talking to tell me everything is fine.”
Borden stated on “60 Minutes” that Rich was fired for no other reason than the theft of the milk and the kit, and that a company with 30,000 employees must “view any theft as important.”
However, Frankovich cites other “wrist slap” offenses for which she says senior attendants have been dismissed since Icahn took over, such as sending a “Boycott TWA” postcard to a friend (the union has an ongoing boycott campaign). (That attendant was reinstated with back pay as the result of arbitration, according to a union spokeswoman.) One senior woman was fired, Frankovich says, when accused of telling a passenger she “hopes Icahn burns in hell” (a charge the attendant has denied); that case is pending arbitration.
Buckstein told CBS’s Harry Reasoner that there is “nothing that I’m aware of” other than the theft that would have caused TWA to dismiss Rich after 24 years’ service.
Later, he told The Times, “We probably have spent more time on this topic than we’d like to.” Charging “distortions” in the television segment, he said, “The impression created was that Ms. Rich is going to lose her pension benefits. That absolutely is not true.”
“What I care about,” Rich says, is “denying me what I’ve worked 25 years for over a quart of milk.” That includes her unlimited lifetime TWA pass and company-paid life insurance and medical benefits, which she says she will lose if her firing is upheld, and back pay from Oct. 7--when she was taken off the payroll--until a settlement is reached. She also wants $118,000 as a lump sum rather than in monthly stipends after normal retirement age.
Asked what TWA is prepared to do to reach a settlement with Rich, Buckstein said, “I don’t want to negotiate a settlement with you. I don’t believe in airing grievances or issues in the press.”
But, he emphasized, Rich was “absolutely not” singled out as a symbol of the people TWA would like to get rid of.
There is “a fair amount of precedent” both within the company and throughout the industry, Buckstein says, for the firing of Rich.
If she will settle, he says, “We will allow her to take her pension benefits in a lump sum” and “will not insist on her waiving her right” to her back-pay claim. He emphasized that the company made this offer prior to public airing of the case on “60 Minutes.”
Icahn says, “Everyone in the airline knows they can always call me. It’s very strange she didn’t call me when she felt she had been unfairly treated . . . at that time, general counsel or I would certainly have given her the back pay claim if she had just called us. I would certainly have given her both things she wants.”
And now? “Why should it be different?” Icahn asks. “I believe this would definitely be our policy.”
Rich says, “All I can say is, I wish I’d called him, too. I didn’t call him because he is responsible for his management policies and management has been treating me with unrelenting maliciousness. I thought they were carrying out his mandate.”
A TWA source suggests, “It appears at this point she or her lawyers feel they can make a big fee out of this.”
What does Rich want from TWA now? Nothing less than “complete exoneration,” she says, an admission from management that a mistake was made. And, she says, “I want my job back.”
Rich also hopes her high profile will give a boost to the union’s current industrywide effort to get certification by the FAA, much as pilots are licensed. Certification, she says, would guarantee uniform training standards, legal limitations on hours and safeguarded rights such as “a meal period, break periods, a place to sit” in flight--"We want this job to be a career.”
She adds, “There’s a connection between morale and safety. Every airline that’s treating its front-line workers as if they’re disposable pieces of machinery is playing with real fire.”
Rich intends to keep making noise. “I’m not a mouse,” she says, “and I hate being bullied.” If TWA won’t settle on her terms, she says, “I will wait until arbitration” and “I’m going to win that arbitration. I’ll get my job back, too.”
But would Icahn give her back her job? “Under no circumstances would she get the job back,” he says, adding that it is TWA policy that “stealing, no matter what it is, cannot be condoned. . . .”
Adds Corr, “We can’t have two sets of standards, one for those who complain, one for those who don’t.”
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But would Icahn give her back her job? “Under no circumstances would she get the job back,” he says, adding that it is TWA policy that “stealing, no matter what it is, cannot be condoned. . . .”
That pretty much sums it up. Should be the end of this story.
That pretty much sums it up. Should be the end of this story.
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Over unionised majors are doomed. There is no justification to pay flight attendant $250k irrespectively of length of service. It is not happening in any other industry and it shall not be happening in airlines.
Usually the old flight attendants have the worst attitude towards customers who tend to forgive them because of the age, and then you have a similarly aged group of customers who writing the commendations for them in a sprit “she is one of us”. Get real.
Usually the old flight attendants have the worst attitude towards customers who tend to forgive them because of the age, and then you have a similarly aged group of customers who writing the commendations for them in a sprit “she is one of us”. Get real.
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Quite a few posts here by posters who seem confident that the FA is guilty of theft. Her complaint makes it clear that she disputes the accusation and claims that she was set up by hostile and envious co-workers and terminated by management eager to rid the company of an expensive senior employee. Unless someone is aware of evidence other than that so far presented here, It's a bit difficult to understand why anyone would conclude either that she is guilty and her firing was justified, or that her contrary claim is the truth.
We don't know and can't know. And I hope some of you are slower to leap to conclusions if you're called for jury duty.
We don't know and can't know. And I hope some of you are slower to leap to conclusions if you're called for jury duty.
What are Required Minimum Distributions?
Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) generally are minimum amounts that a retirement plan account owner must withdraw annually starting with the year that he or she reaches 70 ½ years of age or, if later, the year in which he or she retires.
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans...istributions#1
Terms of the plan govern
The plan’s terms may allow you to wait until the year you actually retire to take your first RMD (unless you are a 5% owner). Alternatively, a plan may require you to begin receiving distributions by April 1 of the year after you reach age 70½, even if you have not retired.
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans...ributions-rmds