Airline Is Getting A Flight Attendants Union – After Only 8 Crew Voted For It

by Gary Leff

Avelo Airlines flight attendants voted to unionize.

  • Only 14 flight attendants voted in the election

  • And the results were 8-6 in favor.

Let’s be clear. This isn’t a single Starbucks location. This is an airline.

To be sure, Houston-based Avelo is a startup. They’re scheduled to operate 630 flights this month, an average of just 21 a day, using 8 Boeing 737s. The same number of flight attendants voted to form a union as Avelo has planes.


Credit: Avelo Airlines

Avelo employs 77 flight attendants, and litigation will determine whether 8 of them can bind the group to a union and enforce dues-paying. And not just whether those 8 can bind the current 77 crew, but in all likelihood all future cabin crew as the airline grows.

The carrier is contesting the election, largely because of the small number of voters: it has filed suit against the National Mediation Board (NMB). But AFA President Sara Nelson says the election was delayed, partially due to the airline’s efforts. This meant that the original bargaining unit diminished due to attrition.

AFA-CWA flight attendants union head Sara Nelson blames the poor turnout in the union election on Republicans in the Senate, who blocked Democratic-nominees from assuming a majority on the National Mediation Board. The airline says that the union managed to keep other flight attendants from voting and that only 14 crewmembers were eligible to vote.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  5. The right wing trolls that inhabit your blog’s comments astonish me, Gary. When elections are won, the haters simply want to dispose of the results and leave things as before……. wait: This sounds mighty damned familiar in another context, doesn’t it?

  6. Glad you made the correlation with Starbucks. Elections at local Starbucks units have been giving the senior ELT and their third-party lawyers “fits”. I wouldn’t be surprised if Starbucks ends up “licensing” the unionized locations to third-parties – similar to the Chick-fil-A model.

    The mostly young Starbucks are not smart, rather, they are just following boilerplate organizing techniques filed by other Starbucks locations with the NLRB, and to their credit – they have have a majority of the employees at that location sign the union cards – enough to ask for an election.

    Of course, the devil is in the details. At many of the Starbucks locations, when it comes time to vote, many of the employees don’t either vote – or are no longer employed at the location (high turnover in retail), so the pool of eligible voters becomes smaller than what was on the day the request for an election was filed.

    At many of the Starbucks locations, you have less than 10 people voting – and as long as there is a majority who have voted “yes” – then the union is voted in.

    It sucks for the employees who don’t want to be in the union – unless you’re in a right-to-work state such as Florida, Arizona, Texas, Indiana and 23 other states where employees are not compelled to join a union nor pay any kind of agency fees.

    It sucks if you’re in California, New York, Washington, Illinois and 19 other states where you are forced as a condition of employment to join the union – or, pay an agency fee and go through the bureaucratic headache of filing an additional request to not pay fees that go toward political activity.

    Going back to Avelo – is the turnover of flight attendants that bad for such a young airline? Was the request for representation made by a majority of the flight attendants at the Burbank or New Haven base?

    SO_CAL_RETAIL_SLUT

  10. Ummmm probably should include the total number of FAs at the airline I assume there is more than 14 at the airline but I don’t know how many. For Avelo and others that oppose or don’t understand democracy – sorry this is the way elections work.

  11. @Kogger J – Ohhhhhh-K. Ya might want to check back into your mental institution before the guys with the butterfly nets come looking for ya!! 🙂

  12. In a free society, the employer would have the right to terminate any employee who voted for union representation, if they so choose.

  13. So did the vote come about because 30% or more of the group asked for a union vote? Then hardly anyone voted? Makes you wonder how they got to a vote ion the first place.

  14. sad this new airline is having trouble with horrid unions already!!! Not good for it’s future.

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