Flight attendant news blog Paddle Your Own Kanoo highlights the discrepancy in benefits that flight attendants receive compared to pilots, and that flight attendants receive at regional airlines compared to mainline carriers.
Specifically, he notes:
- At Delta’s regional airline Endeavor Air, union flight attendants receive 3 days of paid bereavement leave after the death of a close relative, while pilots at the same airline receive five days of paid leave. Their union complains,
Same company. Same operation. Same family tragedy. Different value assigned to the employee experiencing it. What exactly is the difference between a pilot grieving the loss of a parent and a Flight Attendant grieving the loss of a parent? Does one hurt more? Does one recover faster? Or has the company simply decided that one employee group’s time is more valuable than another’s?
- Endeavor Air flight attendants receive $2.25 per hour in per diem, while mainline Delta flight attendants receive $3.30 per hour in per diems. The union puts Delta on blast:
Apparently, the cost of being away from home is different depending on whose paycheck you receive. The problem is that reality doesn’t work that way. The restaurant charges us the same. The hotel charges us the same. The airport charges us the same. The only place where our value changes is on paper.
Author Mateusz Maszczynski writes, “Make it Make Sense.” I’m not sure it’s a great strategy for Sara Nelson’s AFA-CWA to be complaining about how much better the non-union flight attendants at Delta have it than what she’s been able to get in exchange for union dues. But let’s give this a shot. None of this is about moral worth.
- Union contract negotiations are about getting the most total value from the employer, and also about divvying that value up according to the varied priorities of union members. Often that means redistributing from junior crew to senior crew. But it also means paying attention to different priorities.
There’s a tradeoff between regular pay and per diem amounts. There’s a tradeoff between health benefits and paid time off. It doesn’t make sense to look at one piece of a contract and say “that’s not fair” when it was part of an overall negotiation.
- Pilots valued bereavement leave enough to negotiate for more of it. That’s also easier for them to do, because the total value of the pilot contract is greater. That’s because it’s harder to hire and replace pilots, so airlines have to pay more for them.
Becoming a pilot can take 2.5 to 3 years and cost $100,000 – $150,000 out of pocket. You’re spending a year and a half to two years, usually, as a flight instructor making very little. So it’s not just cash out of pocket, it’s foregone earnings while you chase required hours.
A flight attendant does 4-8 weeks of company training and at least 5 hours supervised operating experience. There’s a much broader pool of potential candidates for flight attendant roles. Flight attendants are much easier to replace, and it’s a lot faster to replace to replace them.
- Pilots have a lot more leverage in negotiations. They can shut down an airline. They can slow down planes. They can work to rule and write up minor items for maintenance. They use their judgment around when things might seem or feel off, questioning things for safety. The pilots at American Airlines basically decided that CEO Tom Horton had to go, and that’s a big part of how we got US Airways and Doug Parker taking over.
- Not everyone gets paid bereavement leave! About a third of U.S. workers don’t have paid funeral leave at all, according to decade-old Bureau of Labor Statistics data. And those that do often just get the day of the funeral, while they’re being paid three days and treating it as an abomination. Endeavor Air’s flight attendants aren’t living Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
- I also think I want my pilot taking more time to get their head straight after a loss, rather than being incentivized to rush back into the cockpit!
When the union asks “[w]hat exactly is the difference between a pilot grieving the loss of a parent and a Flight Attendant grieving the loss of a parent?” it’s not that “one hurt[s] more” and they may take the same amount of time to recover – but the consequences of working not fully recovered are different!
- Pay at mainline airlines is better than at regionals, generally. The whole idea of major airlines using regional carriers is B-scales. They need lower wages for smaller planes serving smaller cities. A $300,000 a year pilot doesn’t pencil on a 50-seat regional jet operating short flights (amortized over fewer passengers, and few premium passengers) the way they can on a widebody aircraft carrying business class passengers to London.
Writing this is going to make me sound cold, because I’m offering explanations that are true rather than saying things that feel good. In fact, the AFA-CWA union knows this is true but it’s a good way to rile up their members. It’s internal politics, not collective bargaining.
I know a great many wonderful, warm flight attendants who represent their airlines well and do a tremendous job earning customer loyalty. And they’re truly underpaid, because they’re paid by formula and on averages. That’s unfortunate!
I think it’s important to be realistic about the direction that a job can take you, rather than staying in it expecting things to change. Whether an airline work group is unionized or not isn’t going to alter these outcomes, either. The union wage premium – the extra amount union workers earn compared to similarly-situated non-union workers – has declined from 15% down to 4% – 7% and in many industries, mostly disappearing about 20 years ago.
It’s not possible for most unions to earn a premium (diminished ability for unions to gain monopoly rents). Pilots are a major exception to this because of restricted entry into the profession.
United’s AFA flight attendants took five and a half years to get a raise, and celebrated the big raises they finally did get – but it mostly just made up for the inflation that eroded the value of their earnings in the meantime. This wasn’t a actually as much of a windfall as it appeared in nominal terms.
AFA’s union flight attendants complain they aren’t doing as well as Delta’s non-union flight attendants, or as well as pilots. And that’s exactly what you’d expect. So when Paddle Your Own Kanoo says “[r]egional flight attendants do the same job as their mainline peers and want to build long-term careers at their regional airline” that’s exactly the tradeoff they’re making.
The way to earn more usually isn’t to ‘fight for it’ it’s to improve your human capital and find a place where it’s more highly valued. That is not easy!
A heart surgeon will always make more than the person that mops the hospital floors. The former has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and years to develop his/her skill base. That’s how it works.
And again I will bet to those that come in with commie crap would never take a pay cut and have that money go towards employees in their company that make less.
Ah, a two-part attack on labor today, huh, Gary? You start with sick leave, now bereavement, with the twist of trying to pit workers against each other (pilots vs. flight attendants). Red-meat for the View from the Right Wing base!
I’ll stand by what I said on your sick leave post (once you actually manually approve whatever was auto-mod’ed): The underlying tension here is because the US lacks a unified, national framework for airline worker protections. Instead of a sensible federal baseline that standardizes benefits and balances worker dignity with network reliability, our system forces everything down to the leverage of collective bargaining, or the cost-cutting optimization of regional subsidiaries.
Let’s just say it: Pilots have that extra leverage because of entry barriers, high training costs, and their unique ‘power’ to ground an aircraft (if they strike). But, when an airline uses that asymmetry to decide a pilot’s grief is worth five days and a flight attendant’s is worth three, or that a regional crew member eats cheaper meals on layovers than a mainline peer, that’s pretty cruel.
So, whether it’s legalese like “ADA preemption” (for sick leave), and whatever technicality or euphemism they’re using here (for bereavement), it’s the same struggle to balance human dignity and basic worker protections against corporate profits. Can’t blame these crew members for attempting moral outcries to claw back what the owners try to deny them.
(Huh, auto-modded, yet again. Was it referring to the ‘ADA’?)
@George Romey — Strawman, like usual. You’re conflating basic base pay scale disparities (which nobody is arguing against) with a minimal baseline of human decency, like bereavement leave. Implying that a pilot’s grief is worth five days of paid leave while a flight attendant’s is only worth three because of “skill base” is absurd. Grief isn’t prorated by a seniority list.
(Also, if you keep calling worker protections ‘communism,’ you’re going to dilute that word, and, perhaps, invite the younger generations, who have known nothing but the cruelty of unregulated capitalism, to actually consider it as a viable alternative, when, historically, it hasn’t been.)
tell us the percentage of American workers in total that get even 3 days of paid bereavement
now tell us the percentage of unionized American workers that get 3 days of paid bereavement.
A contract was negotiated. Period.
@Tim Dunn — You’re pointing to broken general labor market to justify substandard benefits in a highly consolidated, federally regulated industry. It’s not that airline workers are asking for too much; it’s that US baselines are uniquely low.
@Parker — You might as well have said “just doing business.” Let’s recall how airlines manipulate corporate shell structures (regional subsidiaries) to depress labor costs and dilute union leverage. Just because a broken system allows an airline to squeeze its front-line workers on something as basic as grief doesn’t mean it’s smart operational strategy, and it certainly doesn’t make it right.
(And, before someone pretends everything is de-regulated since 1978… uh, no, it’s not completely unregulated; see, cabotage, or bankruptcy protections allowing them to shred labor contracts, dump pension obligations onto taxpayers, for just a few specific examples…)
According to Grok the average paid leave for the death of an immediate family member (parent, spouse, child) in the US is 3-5 days so none of this is out of the ordinary.
As far as the practice, given this is generally a rare but horrific event (maybe for the exception of an elderly parent) I think a more fair leave for IMMEDIATE family members should be 1-2 weeks. But that’s not the norm.
so even Endeavor FAs don’t get worse than the AI stated average; pilots just happen to be at the high end of average while FAs are at the low end.
and 1990, I agree that this should be a standard but there are few employers that are in monopoly industries so if potential employees think it matters, they should choose employers accordingly.
and employers that exceed the average should be highlighted
@Tim Dunn, @George Romey — You each continue to compare an internal corporate double standard to an external national average. We aren’t talking about how Delta or American compares to a local retail chain or a manufacturing plant (if we even have many of those remaining anymore). It’s two employees working inside the same metal (no, no composite!) tube, representing the same corporate brand, dealing with a similar family tragedy, where management decides one person’s grief is worth 40% less time off than the other’s.
Tim, we can highlight the employers that exceed the average, but the market isn’t a pure meritocracy. Mainline network carriers outsource their routes to these secondary corporate shells to depress labor costs and strip away standard work rules, while locking those same regional employees into flow-through agreements that dictate their career progression. That’s not an an infinite menu of competitive choices….
Also, George, “According to Grok…” c’mon, you mean Elon’s propaganda tool that would most certainly refer to his ‘hand gesture’ as a “Roman salute” and not an obvious appeal to… (well… you know who.) If you’re going to rely on an AI that’s hardcoded to validate its owner’s alternate realities (no, no.. ‘alternate facts’), you’re going to get exactly what you *want* to hear.
I don’t get any funeral leave.
@1990 you know I love you, but on this we disagree. The union engaged in collective bargaining with the airline. They negotiated for what mattered. If this matters so much to them they can negotiate it when the co tract comes due. There is no sore loser clause in contract negotiations. Not how it works. Not how it should work.
Everyone gets less than pilots…….in everything
@Parker — Aww. Respectfully, it’s a bit more nuanced under the RLA than a regular private-sector contract. CBAs don’t actually expire; they just become “amendable.” Management has every incentive to drag out those negotiations, stalling for years to maintain the cheaper status quo. Meanwhile, the union can’t engage in self-help or strike unless they are released by the NMB, which is so rare that it can take up to 5 years of mandatory mediation first.
So, the unions here really aren’t merely being ‘sore losers.’ Once the rank-and-file are years into a freeze, frontline workers are so desperate for a baseline raise or a ratification bonus just to catch up with inflation that the union leadership is practically forced to triage. They end up sacrificing bereavement days or per diems just to secure standard hourly wage increases. So, saying they ‘should have just negotiated it’ ignores that the system is engineered to make them choose between a living wage and basic workplace dignity. It really shouldn’t be a false choice like that.
(@Parker, I had a reply, but Gary’s been auto-modding a lot of things that are on-topic. Hopefully, he will eventually manually approve what I said. Generally, it’s more nuanced than regular private sector contracts because of the RLA, so no, I don’t think the union or its members are being sore losers here.)
(I guess Gary finally woke up and had his coffee… thanks for approving the prior auto-mods.)
“..who have known nothing but the cruelty of unregulated capitalism,…”
This doesn’t exist and goes a long way towards explaining this individual’s limited understanding of economics and public policy.
@Mike P — Ah, a masterclass in cherry-picking. (And, kudos on not using the r-word this time.)
The problem in today’s US airline industry is crony capitalism and regulatory capture; sure, some regulations are overly broad, and need to be refined and improved. But, to throw it all out, no.
(You really still advocating for getting rid of the government on here? C’mon man, the ‘sovereign citizen’ stuff simply doesn’t work in-practice.)
Very good analysis, @Gary. If 5 days of bereavement leave is important to you, if getting the same per diem as mainline is important, then negotiate it. But, of course, you didn’t because, even if they won’t say it out loud, they knew it would mean less flight pay or other benefits. Wouldn’t it be fun if the FAs had a contract that allowed them individually to select: A, current bereavement, per diem, and pay scale, or B, 5 bereavement days, mainline per diem, and a pay scale reduced by X%? How could they complain then?
@This comes to mind — Really? A ‘choose your own adventure’ contract?
Collective bargaining exists to prevent management from weaponizing individualized compensation to exploit the most vulnerable segments of the workforce. If you give workers the false ‘choice’ of fewer bereavement days for a marginally higher pay scale, you aren’t offering ‘freedom’; you are creating a flawed system that coerces some into trading away their basic human dignity during a family tragedy just to pay rent.
Not to mention, your bad idea would be an nightmare for crew tracking and scheduling. So, no, it doesn’t need to be a zero-sum trade-off against pay. In civilized society, we should be able to establish a non-negotiable baseline of human decency, like a uniform bereavement standard, without demanding that workers take a pay cut to grieve.
Is this really what they’re teaching in Ohio schools? Oof.