I have tremendous appreciation for the flight attendants who show me little kindnesses along the way as I travel. A smile and a bit of enthusiasm makes the whole trip that much better. And I feel badly for the way that some passengers treat them. With millions of people flying in the U.S. each day there are some bad apples among the customers – and then some. It can be a lot to endure on top of grueling schedules away from home and across time zones.
However I’m going to make some readers mad talking about flight attendant pay for a moment. Flight attendant unions love to highlight the struggles of their newest members, but rarely represent those members well.
- I believe I was the first to document that first- and second-year American Airlines flight attendants based in Boston actually qualified for food stamps before their latest contract.
- Now, United Airlines flight attendant who held a substitute teaching and Instacart delivery job on the side has filed for bankruptcy, citing low pay at the airline whose contract remains under lengthy negotiation.
After bankruptcy, she feels better:
I maxed out all my credit cards and took out a loan on my old 401k trying to survive on probation (too fearful to work another job and not be available). And for the last year I’ve been working my ass off trying to beat the interest on the credit cards but to no avail.
In my state you can qualify for chapter 7 up until 75k annual income so I did it . I surrendered my car and it even wiped some of my student loans. I sleep so much better at night. Now I can go to the job and worry about shit that doesn’t matter like “sparkling water ” and where coworkers that I’m never gonna see again commute from.
New Contracts Don’t Primarily Benefit The Least Well Off
When American Airlines flight attendants secured a new contract, it meant bigger raises for senior flight attendants not junior ones – both in total dollar terms and even in percentage terms.
- A first year flight attendant got a $5.47 per hour (18%) raise, while a 13th year flight attendant got $13.99 (20%) more per hour. Retro pay was similarly orders of magnitude greater for senior cabin crew compared to junior ones that the union trotted out for sympathy.
- New flight attendants also see much more grueling schedules than before the new deal, to give even work schedules to senior crew.
First and second-year flight attendants are at the forefront of messaging over a new contract, but benefit much less than their more senior colleagues when a new deal finally happens.
In fact, one American Airlines flight attendant base President campaigned against the new contract because it gave too big a benefit to junior crew.
Boarding pay disproportionately benefits newer flight attendants who work more, shorter flights than senior crew who work fewer, longer flights. He understood that boarding pay wasn’t really a raise – it was money that didn’t go into the wage – and he preferred it in the wage to benefit senior flight attendants at the expense of junior ones.
It’s precisely that boarding pay is just part of total bargained compensation, and the union tendency to seek benefits for senior members at the expense of junior ones, that it was not a bargaining priority until non-union Delta did it first and shamed them into following suit with their own demands.
The Least Well Off Flight Attendants Suffer To Benefit Senior Colleagues
Airlines basically agree to flight attendant pay on average cost. A more senior flight attendant is not more productive or more valuable to an airline than a junior one. They perform the exact same function.
In order for senior members of the union to earn more, they sacrifice junior members who earn less. That’s the union’s desire, not the company’s.
The only way flight attendants can add more value to the airline is to provide better service, make customers happier, who then become willing to spend a premium to keep flying that airline. Yet no union contract incentivizes this, or allows differential pay on this basis.
A crewmember working a given flight has no other way to become more productive, and so the only way to earn more is to work more flights. Yet over time work rules and regulation limit how much a flight attendant can work (and indeed, there are good fatigue-based reasons for certain limits).
Why Flight Attendants Are Earning More Today
Flight attendants across the industry are making more because Delta Air Lines set a high bar, introducing boarding pay, unilaterally increasing wages and with the industry’s most generous profit sharing by a wide margin.
It’s no surprise that profit sharing is greater, and that customers frequently report that flight attendants at Delta are somewhat friendlier, and no coincidence that Delta flight attendants are unique in that they are also not unionized.
However, profit sharing aside, most raises that flight attendants have seen have largely been just keeping up with inflation and broader wage trends. The primary driver of increased flight attendant pay is the Baumol effect, or cost disease: flight attendant pay rises despite lack of productivity gain because of productivity gains in other sectors.
The cost of a flight attendant goes up because the opportunity cost of a flight attendant doing something in another industry is higher (cross elasticity of demand), not because a flight attendant gets more valuable. And airlines are required to have flight attendants, roughly 1 per 50 seats on an aircraft.
United’s Union Has Slow-Walked A New Contract On Purpose
While United negotiations have dragged on for years, it was only three weeks ago that United flight attendants even specified wage demands as part of their bargaining, and only then at the insistence of federal mediators.
The AFA-CWA union pursued a strategy of pushing American Airlines flight attendant negotiations first. American’s cabin crew are represented by a different union, but AFA-CWA lent their lead negotiator to focus on that other deal. It put American’s flight attendants in jeopardy of having to strike, and created a higher wage floor to negotiate the United deal off of. It’s disingenuous to lay the slow march to a contract at the feet of United management.
It’s Still Tough To Be An Entry-Level Flight Attendant
At around 80 hours a month of flight time, entry-level flight attendants earn about the $30,000 that I earned on an inflation-adjusted basis when I first lived on my own out of college in D.C. I was single, and didn’t have many obligations. I went out to lunch regularly, but ordered the specials, and avoided adding a soda. I had a roommate.
Flight attendants have time for second (and in the case of the flight attendant filing chapter 7, third) jobs but the work still takes a toll.
United crew can expect to see at least 25% more pay immediately (between hourly rate increase and boarding pay) once a new deal goes into effect. This will never be the sort of career where you earn a fantastic living, even as you gain seniority. A senior American Airlines flight attendant under the new contract tops out around $80,000 – more with picking up the most lucrative extra shifts – while an elected union rep can make about 50% more without having to fly.
That sort of pay potential works for a lot of people. But it’s important to understand where it ends up going in, and choose lifestyle accordingly and relative to other possible options.
The other thing to know about entry level pay is that despite it being low, and despite the work being arduous at times, plenty of people still want to do it! So for the right person it turns out to be either a great career, or a great couple of years before moving on to do something else.
And yet everyone seems to forget the regional flight attendants who work even more flights per day and more ground time and LOT LESS PAY. Yet sarah Nelson and afa cry for united and leave the regionals in the dust. The whole system is a scam.
41.9 million Americans receive SNAP benefits, amounting to 12.5% of the entire population
Under the CARES Act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act: Passenger airlines received $54 billion.
Yeah, the foreign flyers benefit, andflying staff benefit, while many of us wage slaves are taxed to keep this high-flying lifestyle airborne. What’s the moral of the story?
Reasonable overall. I do think the Washington analogy is a little off as real estate and rent prices have exploded far beyond the level of inflation.
“I sleep so much better at night.”
Well, based on your story, we can surmise it wasn’t your upstanding morals keeping you up at night.
you got one out of three of your main points in this article right, Gary
1. the FA simply chose a career that didn’t pay what she needed to match her spending, no matter how many side jobs she took on. Nobody forces anyone to take on debt and nobody forces someone to file for bankruptcy. All of society pays for those that cannot control their spending. The only salvation is that personal BK comes at a high cost in terms of loss of access to credit which she should have never been given.
2. You say that UA mgmt should not be held responsible for the lack of a new contract – and you are partially right. Yes, the union is fighting about how to take control of the most money for the most senior FAs at the expense of the most junior but UA mgmt touted multiple times that their employees were better off waiting for other airlines to settle so that UA could then top that and create industry leading pay. UA mgmt knew all along that they would not have to pay up as soon as AA FAs settled because they knew the pace of negotiations. UA FAs are losing out on profit sharing – part of why UA’s profit sharing in total is so much less than DL’s – and they like AA’s FAs will never recover the lost interest on the money they did not have that DL FAs did have in a period where interest rates have been high.
3. You did get right that DL mgmt chose early on to set a high bar for post covid airline salaries. As I have noted multiple times, DL knew it could afford those labor rates but it would increasingly squeeze other airlines to pay those rates… part of the collapse of the ULCC sector is because of the high labor rates which DL knew those carriers could not afford. AA will continue to underperform because it has to pay wages it cannot afford. WN is being forced to restructure its model because it is paying labor rates that are well above its ability to generate revenue.
You are also right that DL wants happy employees because they take care of customers that will spend more money – and that most certainly does take place.
and it isn’t lost on DL or its FAs that the post covid handling by AA, UA and WN’s FA unions has hurt their case about trying to unionize DL FAs – and that halo effect will last for 10 years or the next crisis when the same thing will happen again.
the AFA can’t do the right thing for all people while DL can. Certain individuals will not be able to live within their salary no matter what they make.
thanks for taking on the tough issues and saying at least some things that are right… the core here is that an anecdotal story about a FA tells more about poor financial choices by one individual than anything new about airline labor that we didn’t already know
What here is WRONG, @Tim Dunn? You say United benefits not paying out greater profit sharing as this goes on, and that isn’t WRONG, but the union hadn’t even stated its economic terms until a few weeks ago and THEY were intentionally slow walking to get the AA contract done first. Both of those things are 100% correct.
Is the union guilty sure, it’s got an I got mine POV
Let’s also look at the airlines themselves, if they can separate the (somewhat) haves from the have nots to screw then both they will and do
It’s just like the rest of our economy, billionaires pointing towards the people with a dollar saying to others they’re trying to steal it.
First, I’m someone that has gone through real difficult financial times so I can relate. However, what I did was get into a position to increase my skillset and find something that the market values. So today I travel constantly always either booking premium or paying for a cash upgrade rather than paying for the increasingly losing upgrade lottery. Far cry for when I was living at the Salvation Army.
1. No one forces someone to become a flight attendant and in fact Delta recently reported their career webpage crashed because of so many applicants. If young people were more realistic about the pay versus providing for themselves and earning a good living the airlines might be encouraged to pay more because young people would see the horror of the math and not apply. Too many people dream of the flight attendant life and never consider how am I going to make it on $35K for a few years.
2. As noted in the article the unions have created this situation. Ditto for providing for a higher hourly rate in lieu of boarding pay in which senior flight attendants working two individual flights in a week make out better. Maybe it’s time to get rid of the unions.
3. I’m not sure what forced the flight attendant to run up so much debt. Get a roommate, another flight attendant would be perfect. Live close to your home airport (some flight attendants obviously commute) so that maybe you won’t need a car and can use public transportation. Again for the first few years.
Not saying there isn’t a point here but there’s some shared blame.
Gary
like George I think the focus of THIS article should be less about the failure of the collective bargaining process or the fact that airlines operate in high cost cities which we all know.
The focus is and should be the FA’s poor decisions esp. around running up student debt and then getting hired by a union airline which involved having to be based in a high cost city.
You got the union dynamics right but you do a disservice to unions (and I am hardly one of their supporters) for pinning individual bad financial decisions on the unions
and UA did at least partially contribute to the situation with the AFA because they didn’t want to have to settle any sooner that they had to – which hasn’t come yet – because they will financially benefit by convincing the AFA that UA would top any other contract or DL when UA knew they wouldn’t have to pay what they would if they had matched DL earlier – including with snap up clauses.
UA FAs pay the price and ultimately so do their customers. and that ultimately WILL impact UA’s bottom line one way or another
Those pay rates are well below minimum wage. Illegal then? Either way I saw this – if you don’t like your job or it won’t support the lifestyle you want to live then quit! It’s called “at will” employment for a reason. This article says FA’s make $5 an hour while fast food workers make $20. So quit and go work at a restaurant. Or office job. Or anything. Yeah it sucks and the employers (big airlines) are jerks but get another job and move on. It’s that simple. Same as the rest of us do when we are unhappy with our jobs for compensation or other reasons. Grow up, be an adult and take charge of your life!