American Airlines is putting flight attendants through a de-escalation training, but not the kind that United crew went through after the David Dao passenger dragging incident to try to reduce customer conflicts. This is to try to reduce conflict between flight attendants themselves.

Across the industry, senior flight attendants have had scorn for their new hire colleagues seeing them as lazy and entitled.

At American, apparently the issue goes further. Senior crew show contempt for newer hires who get to pick up premium international trips, seeing this as illegitimate, and have been confronting them onboard over it.

Flight attendants at American Airlines are being made to complete an online training course in how to de-escalate arguments between veteran crew members and new hires – especially when it comes to newer flight attendants getting assigned ‘premium’ international trips.

…[B]ecause it’s relatively rare for younger crew members to be assigned these kinds of favored European trips, a common question asked by senior crew members is: “How did you even get this trip?”

It might seem like a relatively simple question, but it can sometimes be loaded with undertones that result in tension and animosity.

That tension has become so apparent, even to AA’s training teams, that they are now requiring crew members to complete an online training module to try to address this type of questioning.

Traditionally the best trips go to the most senior crew. That’s how union seniority works. Even where the union isn’t able to get more money and perks overall for their members, they often work to redistribute income and benefits away from junior crew to senior ones. That’s especially true for the most recent American Airlines flight attendant contract ratified in 2024.

• New hires got just a $5.47 per hour raise while most flight attendants received $13.99 per hour more.

  This isn’t just that new hires make less, so the same percentage increase is smaller for them – the union negotiated a smaller percentage increase for junior crew than for senior ones, even after using their plight (first and second-year Boston-based crew were eligible for food stamps) as the face of their fight for a new contract.

• What’s more, the new contract effectively created B-scale work rules, with new flight attendants working straight reserve in order to give those with more seniority better schedules.

Still, junior flight attendants can work some of the best trips. For instance,

• Now that American offers boarding pay, short domestic hops are more attractive, and senior flight attendants sometimes bid those instead.
  
• Senior flight attendants sell their seniority so that ultra junior cabin crew get to regularly pick up “Tel Aviv, Delhi, London Heathrow” and South America. That can generate $200 per trip, or non-monetary favors.

The insinuation that senior flight attendants have apparently been making is that their junior counterparts have done something untoward and improper to be there, putting them down. Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it isn’t! However the new contract commits the union and the airline to work together to go after flight attendants who sell their trips, a practice that has a number of names that I cannot repeat on a family website.