Labor activist Teddy Xidas won election yesterday as president of US Airways' flight attendants union, elevating a Pittsburgh "hard-liner" to power at a time of crisis for the airline.

Teddy Xidas

Xidas, who does not assume the presidency until Jan. 1, replaces Perry Hayes, who also is based in Pittsburgh. For the last three years, Xidas has run the Association of Flight Attendants Pittsburgh Local 40 council, representing more than 1,100 local flight attendants, and she will keep that position when she takes the union's top post next year.

Xidas conceded yesterday, "I am more of a hard-liner" than the man she will replace. But she promised to take a conciliatory approach, acknowledging her new set of responsibilities to a larger membership, which includes 5,200 flight attendants in Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; New York; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; and Washington, D.C.

It is not known how Xidas' appointment will affect the company's campaign for $150 million in concessions from the flight attendants union, part of $950 million it would like to get from all its unions by the end of the year. The company declined comment yesterday on Xidas' election.

"Maybe it makes peace more likely," said local airline analyst Bill Lauer. "You have the militant opposition in the seat of power. Maybe, in a crazy way, that is a good thing."

Xidas and five other local council presidents will decide whether any of the company's cost-cutting proposals reach a vote of all members, and council members are meeting today and tomorrow to discuss the company's latest offer, which calls for the termination of the flight attendants' pension plan and a 15 percent pay cut.

		Related coverage Bigger burden on retirees

The company also is meeting this week with negotiators from the machinists and passenger service workers.

If the company does not get consensual agreements from any of those three labor groups, it intends to ask a bankruptcy judge to throw out their contracts. Both the passenger service workers and machinists are discussing the possibility of a strike if that happens.

Last month, Xidas suggested that flight attendants might also consider a strike or picketing if a judge revokes their contract. Yesterday, however, she sounded a more moderate tone, saying she was interested in "coming to some kind of an agreement that is livable for both parties."

"We may have changed presidents, but the philosophy has not changed," she said. The goal, she added, is to help the company survive while maintaining jobs for her flight attendants at a "livable" wage.

Xidas, 46, a New Kensington native, has worked for US Airways since 1981, a year after graduating from Robert Morris University.

In her spare time, she got a nursing degree and worked for the Lemington Center in Lincoln-Lemington, where she organized the nurses into a chapter of the Service Employees International Union. Fired for her labor campaign, Xidas got her job back and received back wages as part of a National Labor Relations Board investigation. She later worked for a personal care home in Oakland.

The nursing campaign stoked her appetite for labor activism. "I liked being an employee advocate," Xidas said, "and having a say in safety and benefits and wages. I thought it was the right place to be."

In other US Airways news yesterday, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court gave the airline until April 30 to decide which of its 500 property leases it wants to keep or reject. The airline is scheduled to tell the court today which airplane leases it wants to keep.