UNITED ATTENDANTS PLANNING TURBULENCE; UNION PURSUING LEVERAGE IN TALKS.

Byline: Deborah Adamson Daily News Staff Writer

A group of United Airlines flight attendants will be picketing the Burbank Airport this morning, hoping to garner support from passengers for their union contract talks with management.

``We want the three R's - raises, better retirement and respect,'' said Jane Goodman, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants in Washington.

The attendants are not going on strike and flights will not be delayed, she said. But the group will be handing out information, seeking support.

A spokesman for UAL Corp., the Chicago-based parent of United Airlines, said the picketing is ``flight attendants' exercising their First Amendment rights as U.S. citizens.'' He declined to discuss the labor talks.

Goodman said the leafleting at the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport is the first phase of the union's Create Havoc Around Our System campaign, which seeks to disrupt airline service intermittently by targeting a specific airport, flight or route.

The campaign began in March, one year after the flight attendants' contract became amendable. Under the Railway Labor Act, they cannot go on strike until labor talks completely break down, if a third-person mediator cannot resolve the situation and after a 30-day cooling-off period.

But Goodman is not talking about a nationwide strike. Instead, these are small, disruptive acts where flight attendants walk out of a flight, refuse to do anything except conduct safety procedures or use delaying tactics like taking more time to stow baggage before taking off.

``You can mess up the schedule and mess up the system,'' Goodman said.

She said flight attendants believe that since United has been doing well financially, it should share its fortunes with its employees. After all, she said, companies ask workers for a pay cut when they are in trouble.

United's pilots recently got a 10 percent raise, she added, in addition to profiting from record highs of the company stock. The last time United's flight attendants got a raise was in 1995, the UAL spokesman said.

In general, flight attendants make between $15,000 and $60,000 a year.

Three years ago, most of United's unions took 55 percent ownership of the airline in exchange for $5 billion in wage and benefits cuts. But the flight attendants decided not to join in the ownership and missed out as the company's rising stock has more than tripled.

``It sounds like everyone is getting a piece of the action except the flight attendants and they're upset about it,'' said Joseph Berman, senior aviation analyst for Avmark Inc., an aviation consulting firm in Arlington, Va. ``They're jumping up and down like a child without a toy.''

Berman predicted the flight attendants' campaign won't hurt United. He pointed out that flight attendants are easier to replace than pilots since airlines get tens of thousands of resumes a week for these jobs.

``It's not going to shut the airline down,'' he said. ``It won't affect United that much at all.''