Tag Archives for union.
American Airlines flight attendants want bigger raises than American is offering and they want retro pay back several years, like pilots (who have far more leverage).
So while the airline is holding its Investor Day on Monday afternoon, flight attendants will be holding a protest on Wall Street. The location is meant to symbolize investors, or something? Plus it’s New York, so maybe there will be media.
140 members of the House of Representatives have written to Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian telling him to stay out of union organizing efforts at the airline, and remain neutral. This is dumb.
NPR ran a piece purporting to explain why flight attendants don’t get paid for time spent boarding planes, except they did not explain it at all.
Pilot unions will fight against continued loss in jobs, and very few would push the button today to go from two to one human in the cockpit. But the technology will arrive that will make travel much safer replacing a human at least as co-pilot. And at that point pilot unions will be clearly lobbying against safety.
APFA President Julie Hedrick came out on top in a seven-way race by just 659 votes. She lost Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas – Fort Worth, Miami and New York to A. Marie Plevaritis. In other words, Hedrick’s strength came primarily from legacy US Airways. There remains a split among ex-AFA US Airways flight attendants and those from the American Airlines side.
American Airlines flight attendants, amidst union officer elections and ongoing wage disputes, are escalating their efforts to strike by confronting CEO Robert Isom and pushing for government mediation, despite upcoming negotiations and a previous rejection for a strike during the holiday season.
Currently the union is in the midst of officer negotiations. Union leadership can’t compromise prior to their own elections. A savvy National Mediation Board would encourage negotiations to continue past the results of these member elections, when leadership may be in a better position to negotiate without immediate fear of their roles.
Junior flight attendants often qualify for food stamps, while the most senior ones can work exhausting hours and turn the role into a six figure job – for as long as they can hold up.
Delta Air Lines earned $5.2 billion in 2023 and will pay out $1.4 billion in profit sharing with employees getting about an extra month’s pay.
Delta flight attendants have it better than their peers. They have something real at risk. This isn’t crew at the bottom where a union organizer can point to a better life somewhere else and say ‘we can get you that’. Unionized crew at American and (AFA-represented) United look at what Delta flight attendants have with envy.
Following the recent Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 incident, the NTSB determined that the cockpit voice recorder, in place to help review aviation incidents and make flying safer, had already been recorded over. Two hours of recording time isn’t enough when it takes awhile to recover a ‘black box’. But pilot unions say their members’ privacy trumps safety.
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 »
