NEWS: Surprise! Northwest Needs You

A Northwest Airlines memo announcing plans to recall of all of its furloughed flight attendants and some pilots managed to leaked out yesterday. This is fantastic news for most of these folks and an indicator that business for Northwest is looking better than expected. It is worth noting that there is a decent percentage of flight attendants who took voluntary furloughs. Instead quitting they chose to lay themselves off, maintain a few benefits and see how things went. Northwest has been carrying the cost of keeping these flight attendants current on training, providing flight benefits etc. Now their hand is forced and I wonder if that is part of Northwest's plan. More than one furloughed attendant I have spoken to has mixed feelings about going back to work at this point. Finally, one wonders how this will impact on-going strife between the airline and its flight attendants as they stuggle to hammer out a new union contract. Still its hard not to see this news leak as a positive overall.