American Airlines is firing flight attendants for offering other crewmembers incentives to pick up their trips. The union says this is new, and violates their contract. The Chicago base notified crewmembers on Friday that “Posting a trip with an incentive to drop” had led to “The absolute worst outcome available” and that was done without any progressive discipline.

Our Attendance and Performance Policy is clear. Discipline is meant to be progressive, giving Flight Attendants a chance to correct behavior. Skipping those steps, especially on a rule they just decided to enforce, is a direct violation of just cause and due process.

What’s more, it seems conterproductive. Offering an incentive for someone to pick up a trip promotes gettin trips covered and needing to cancel fewer flights. “Instead, many were Paid Withheld from Service (PW) or disciplined.”

The union filed “a base Notice of Dispute (NOD)…for violating our rights to just cause, due process, and progressive discipline.”

The just cause standard for discipline is something that’s embedded in every airline union contract I’m aware of, and dates to arbitrator Carroll Daugherty’s “Seven Tests of Just Cause” (1964): notice, reasonableness, investigation, fairness, proof, equal treatment, and proportionality.

interestingly, only the AFA-CWA-negotiated pre-merger US Airways labor agreement said explciitly “Discipline will only be levied for just cause.” Last year’s new collective bargaining agreement only embeds it obliquely that I’ve found:

• It says that only probationaries may be discharged “without cause and without hearing,” therefore others cannot.
  
• And the agreement’s default discharge standard is “cause” since, among other things, dismissal for dues-non-payment is deemed to be ‘for cause’.

For years, American Airlines has tried to crack down on the reverse of this, flight attendants paying for trips rather than being paid. Sometimes paying is… in-kind. But it amounts to selling seniority – senior crew bid for the most desirable trips and then sell them to junior crew.

The group of trip traders known as ‘the Cartel’ was already busted. That was a closed group. However, flight attendants apparently post their offers to trade trips in American’s message board thinking they’re clever by speaking in code.. offering up “cookies” in exchange for “hugs,” “kisses,” and “thanks.”

According to the union, the airline has also:

started reviewing what they consider “patterns” in sick calls and is questioning Flight Attendants. You are not required to share personal medical details with American. If you do not feel comfortable discussing your health with management, simply say so.”

Scaring flight attendants from taking sick time (working sick, or taking sick time as discretionary time) is a tactic United Airlines has pursued aggressively and triggered a Department of Labor investation under the Biden administration.

It not only promotes attendance but also serves as pretext for shedding more senior, and therefore more expensive, crew in favor of cheaper new hires.

No U.S. airline explicitly allows buying or selling trips. Low cost European airlines have effectively required flight attendants to buy access to flying, through, where they have ‘leased’ flight attendants through separate companies which require cabin crew to pay their own costs for training and uniforms (and where seniority wasn’t how trips were assigned, other ‘informal’ methods of duty assignment developed).

I wonder though whether a marketplace in trips makes sense – formal rather than the grey markets that develop.

• Seniority is the product of years of service — essentially an investment of time and labor. Workers accept lower wages early in their career in exchange for future rents when they move up the list.

• If a flight attendant has “earned” that seniority through service, they should be able to monetize it – whether by trip trades, sales, or swaps. That helps (labor) supply meets (scheduling) demand: senior attendants who value time off more than incremental pay can sell their trips and junior attendants who value premium trips or additional hours can buy in.

• Resources (flight hours and desirable trips) flow to those who value them most, as revealed by willingness to pay. Both parties are better off, and no one is coerced. The market allocates scarce schedule slots to their highest-valued use.

• And since secondary markets for trip sales make the system more attractive (senior flight attendants generate income, junior flight attendants accelerate their quality of life by buying access), the job overall becomes more desirable – and airlines can recruit and retain better.

  Put another way, they can acquire the supply of flight attendant labor they need at a lower price by increasing the total value of the job package!

What this does on the downside, though, is create jealousies but that’s jealousy over the seniority system itself. Allowing a market doesn’t invent inequality — it monetizes it. Crew are already allowed trip trades and swaps without money. Pricing simply reveals the true value already embedded in seniority.