Strikers Angry : Airline’s Use of CYA Labor Prompts Bill

Amid claims that youths at a Camarillo correctional institution are being used to try to break the TWA flight attendant’s strike, a state assemblyman has proposed legislation to prohibit wards of the state from working during labor disputes.

Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd (D-Lawndale) said that California Youth Authority wards working as reservation agents in a TWA training center at the Ventura School in Camarillo are “strikebreakers, pure and simple.”

TWA and the California Youth Authority have operated a program at Ventura School since January that has trained 24 youths there to handle overflow calls from TWA’S four national reservations centers. Since the strike, the number of youths working on each shift has almost doubled and the hours of operation have been extended, school officials said.

Ventura School Director Clyde McDowell said, however, that the wards were too few to affect the strike.

Effort Called Minuscule

“I think the additional work the young people are doing is so minuscule in the grand design of TWA that they are not breaking the strike in any significant manner,” he said.

Striking flight attendants picketed the school Thursday to object to use of the wards as agents during the strike.

“The state is really lending assistance to TWA in the strike,” said Lynne Adelman, chairwoman of the Los Angeles chapter of the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants.

TWA reservation agents, who are not unionized, have been used to replace striking flight attendants. In turn, Floyd said, the wards are being used to replace the agents.

Adelman charged that more agents had been released from their duties at the Los Angeles center than at other centers, which she said was because they could be replaced with CYA wards.

Sally McElwreath, the airline’s director of corporate communications, said no more agents are being used as flight attendants at the Los Angeles reservation center than at TWA’S four other centers across the country.

Floyd’s legislation would require California Youth Authority programs with industry to shut down during strikes or labor disputes.

Floyd failed Thursday in his attempt to push the legislation through as an urgency measure. A spokesman for Floyd said the bill will get a hearing March 28.