Northwest Airlines is threatening to discipline or fire union employees if they disparage the company in an informational picketing campaign about offshore outsourcing planned for July 2 at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association Local 33 and the Professional Flight Attendants Association are planning to picket outside the ticketing area to raise awareness of the company’s practice of having overseas and third-party repair stations do maintenance on Northwest aircraft.

But a June 18 letter from airline management to the mechanics union, which AMFA posted on its Web site Wednesday, warns of serious consequences.

“Any suggestion that safety or security has been compromised at Northwest is both false and highly damaging to Northwest’s business,” Northwest labor relations vice president Julie Hagen Showers said in the letter.

The picketing might violate the company’s rules that employees not disparage the safety, security or quality of the airline’s operations, she said. The picketing also could constitute using “public economic coercion” to get Northwest to scale back outsourcing, violating the Railway Labor Act, she said.

“Please be aware that the company will view any disparaging comments regarding the safety, security, or quality of the company’s operations as a serious violation of the rules described above,” she said in the letter. “AMFA or PFAA-represented employees who engage in such rule violations will be subject to discipline up to and including discharge.”

AMFA Local 33 president Jim Atkinson said that Northwest’s move was confusing, and that the unions haven’t decided whether to cancel the picketing. The union was still in the process of gathering names of employees who planned to join the picket and had about 50 names.

“I’m very upset by it,” Atkinson said. “It certainly seems to take away your constitutional rights.”

Northwest on Wednesday declined comment beyond Showers’ letter.

The contract that Northwest has with its mechanics allows the Eagan, Minn.-based company to spend about 38 percent of its aircraft maintenance costs on outside vendors. Until recently, the company has been under that limit. But with all the layoffs of mechanics in the past few years, it is bumping against the outsourcing spending cap this year, the union has said. Northwest uses a Singapore company called ST Aviation Services Co. to maintain some of its of DC-10s and 747s.

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