United Airlines flight attendants just got a new contract negotiated by their union, but rank-and-file cabin crew are increasingly negative on the deal.
AFA-CWA promised that, after five years without a raise, their members would get industry-leading pay. Instead they’re getting pay comparable to Delta, and more or less an inflation-adjustment. The average increase in the contract is 26.9%, against inflation since last raise of 24%.
To get those raises there are a number of givebacks that flight attendants are furious over. To be sure, many of the items of concern are really just misinformation or misunderstandings. However some are quite real.
- Assigning hybrid roles and purser duties on an ad hoc basis can mean more work without override pay.
- New grievance and discipline procedures include informal coaching that could help the airline build a disciplinary record – but that can’t be grieved.
Aviation watchdog JonNYC, though, notices something potentially much more significant: the airline can start putting up flight attendants in much lower quality hotels during their layovers. Instead of business class hotels, we could start to see hovels.
All that a hotel needs is “regular maintenance and cleaning” such that it is “in a tenantable condition” in order to qualify for crew lodging assignment, provided that flight attendants get non-smoking rooms with double beds away from elevators, ice and vending machines, housekeepig closets and construction noise. There must be an ATM ‘within reasonable walking distance’ of the hotel, and provide free 800-number phone calls.
UA: from the FA TA, hotel downgrade:
— JonNYC (@xjonnyc.bsky.social) June 11, 2025 at 1:09 PM
At first blush, one wonders how it is even possible that union negotiators agreed to this change. However they have to believe that’s what it took to get some semblance of the raises they promised to members.
The union made a strategic blunder in slow-walking contract negotiations, letting American Airlines go first (and possibly having their flight attendants endure a strike) in order to set a new bar for negotiations. AFA-CWA even lent American’s union their lead negotiator. However they’ve since lost leverage.
- Airline unions cannot strike without government permission
- The Biden administration – the most pro-union in history – did not sign off on any airline strikes. Airlines strikes are very unpopular, and bad for the economy.
- However, Donald Trump was elected and that means Trump appointing a majority of the National Mediation Board and being in a position to delay strikes even if the NMB were to sign off on one.
Without credible threat of strike, the union’s bargaining position declined, but they still needed to get economic terms on part with cabin crew elsewhere in the industry. So we’re seeing a number of items that appear as givebacks.
I take them at their word that this is the best deal they could get. The union emphasizes that flight attendants who believe they should ‘never take the first deal’ are wrong, because the union hasn’t agreed to the first offer. Nonetheless, several contractual changes in the tentative agreement they’re being asked to agree to are going to be deeply unpopular.
LMFAO. Look for…. the Union Label…
What’s a business class hotel anyway? Hampton Inn?
@Craig Jones — Every American wants ‘honest work at decent wages…’
LMAO. Look for….. the Union Label….
@ Gary — The hotel requirements sound better than what customers receive during IRROPs.
If they’re that “outraged”……there’s always the door.
I’ve always seen the cabin and flight deck crews arriving together at hotels.
What happens now? Do the pilots go one way(to better hotels) while the FA’s go to the wrong side of the tracks?
Sounds like they agreed to a regional type quality of life on layovers. La Quintas, Holiday Inn Expresses, Hamptons are in their future. Hopefully there’s language regarding inside hallways, restaurants within walking distance. Hotel ratings of 2.5 stars or higher by an agreed upon site like TripAdvisor. I’ve been there done that as a pilot, woken at night when the police raided a room next to mine at. Red Roof Inn, ER visit from bed bugs at a La Quinta ( yes , I know even nicer hotels can get bed bugs), unsafe airport shuttle vehicles and drivers. If things are awful they should still have some protections such as calling in fatigued or complaints to hotel committee. As someone else noted for anyone who’s been put up by an airline for a cancelled flight it’s no joke there’s some reason sketchy airport hotels out there..
Still an improvement on the original offer of “what we give economy passengers in IRROPs.”
Meanwhile…TPTB cash out…..
There is no new contract, only the old one with new amendments. Soon it will be 5 years since the last general raise in August 2020. I suspect a lot of flight attendants who want to retire with the back pay in their pockets will consider the terms acceptable because they won’t have to deal with them for long.
This is a huge problem at a lot of US based airlines, poor morale. Micromanaging and cutting good benefits back does no good for the passenger experience. Upset employees don’t tend to give the best service or care about the company that they work for. We’ve seen it at American Airlines recently. Saving a few bucks isn’t worth upsetting your crew.
We are hard working human beings. We don’t deserve dumpy hotels. Not right at all.
25% raise in 5 years?! Nobody gets raises like that in any industry! Fair would be 2% inflation each year. Why dont you start with nurses and educators instead of ancillary/non-essential industries.
@Doug Slotolowicz, UA pilots and FAs almost never stay at the same hotel. It’s been that way for years.
This is the first offer and if they are unhappy then they don’t accept it. Saying there were previous offers is not telling an accurate story. Sometimes the way you write indicates you are probably working for United management
People need to learn how to negotiate and not be brain dead.This contract was brought to you by Ken Diaz who is responsible for their current failure of a contract. Vote this down and replace their negotiating team. Southwest and Alaska flight attendants would never accept this language in a contract!
@Cee Bee did you even see Gary’s comparison to inflation… please start doing some critical thinking.
Motel 6. Good god could imagine spending 1/3 of your life in one of those?
I’m a retired pilot. Nice lodging at the end of the day is a must.
I am going to be a hate Frequent Flyer here. Let me say almost 3 Million miles since 81. Here we go- too many FA’s treat passengers poorly because the airlines treat the FA’s worse. Let’s admit it. Airfare is cheap in comparison to other things and passenger benefits have gotten so way out of hand from expected upgrades to airport Clubs that after 40 years I skip the Clubs because I can’t stand the other guests. So time for the airlines to start paying the pilots and FAs what they deserve, with the right benefits whiles flying and after. Now FAs, if you get that you need to pay it back by treating the passengers in all classes better, even the ones I don’t like. Passengers – if you want to fly up front, pay for it. If you did not, you are not entitled to it. No reason to take your entitlement out on anyone else. So FAs you are right. We long time passengers support you, but remember we remember if we get your back you need to get ours too.
Gonna have get used to the smell of that disinfectant that La Quinta uses.
From the amount of negative coverage by Gary, Ben, and Matthew, you would think they are being paid by Bastian and Isom to tank this TA.
It seems abundantly clear that United’s ze relative to the rest of the industry was in 2024 and they accomplish that by underpaying their people, pushing their schedule beyond what airports and the airspace could handle, and flying one of the world’s oldest fleets of widebody aircraft.
Add in deteriorating employee relations, and it just might be American‘s time to challenge Delta once again
Let’s not forget United has to deal with the mechanics who I am certain will not be bamboozled like the flight attendants have been.
Might as well get a plane on standby and offer them first class cabin for the stay. It’s better than cheap motels
Didn’t we just read that the United president gave himself a 34 million dollar bonus. Looks like poor moral for these FAs.
Let’s see how long before a FA gets raped, killed or eaten from bed bugs at the motel they are staying out. Looks like alot of downtown and truck stops hotels for these FAs. Days of FAs being a glamous job is diffently Over!
@ Tim — How’s DL stock doing compared to UA??
Most of you never knew the golden age of flying. A stewardess would take your garment bag as you entered the wide body so you could stow your coat in the coat rack above your seat. There were piano bars, and we got up to socialize as soon as the plane was in the air. You were served heated meals, on china with metal utensils and glass glasses.
And pilots were gods — they made huge salaries and massive pensions. There were so many stewardesses per flight — they were honored and admired — and treated to the same accommodations as the pilots.
I guess since now the job of a “flight attendant” is to push a narrow cart down the narrow aisle to toss you three tiny crackers and a soda, their position has been so demoted that they should be put up overnight in a tiny motel room.
US carrier FA’s are probably the most over represented worker class in the world. If they do not like the terms of their job set by their employer, then they can leave. Nobody is forcing them to stay in that job.
30 year UA F/A here. Allow me to put things into perspective. During UA’s bankruptcy, the company dumped their pension obligations on the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC). My pension payout will be $400 per month when I retire in 2035. UA pilots earn a 17% company match to their 401K’s. We currently earn 8%. The new TA adds an additional 1%. Having lost most of my pension, a 1% increase is unacceptable. One of the core issues with our domestic flying is that the company builds 3-segment red-eyes with lengthy sits in between flights. At legacy UA, our contract only allowed for 1-segment red eye flights. These trips are brutal on the body and the pairings are typically built with short layovers after all night flying. Our network peers negotiated sit pay—a form of ground pay—to mitigate the unpaid time F/A’s are subjected to during lengthy sits. This was a negotiating item that most F/A’s had advocated for. There is no sit pay in the new TA, nor was anything addressed about the multi-segment red-eyes. In our current contract, an airport sit over 4:00 requires a hotel day room. The company intentionally builds trip pairings for 3:59 airport sits in order to avoid providing day rooms. Keep in mind airport sits occur at non-hub locations with no crew rooms for F/A’s to rest throughout lengthy sits. On top of that, other than our $2/hr per diem, we are not getting paid for any sit time. The fact that this was not addressed in the new TA is considered a big blunder. The tipping point is that the new TA will require F/A’s to fly a minimum of 480 hrs per year in order to maintain medical benefits. This is a major concession…especially for an aging workforce that may require time off to care for ailing parents or loved-ones. This also greatly impacts F/A who are out on medical leaves due to illness & injuries. On the legacy UA side, we have conceded our pensions; our work rules; our legal rest parameters; our uniform dry cleaning allowances; 5 out of 10 paid holidays; took 30% total compensation reductions during the bankruptcy years; and conceded free health care (we now pay a portion of our medical—mine costs me $350/month pre-tax).
I think Scott Kirby is a visionary—the first one out of 7 UA CEO’s throughout my tenure at UA. He has positioned the company well for realizing its full earnings potential. I give him credit where due and he has been handsomely compensated for his efforts whereas UA flight attendants have not. We are now fifth in pay of the big 5 and rank second to Delta in earnings. Sadly, the TA not only does not adequately compensate us, but we’re asked to concede even more.
I love what I do and I call the best from within myself every time I go to work. I am an asset to United because I take great pleasure in providing service excellence. But I have just grown weary of continually conceding our hard earned benefits and work rules in every contract.
Lastly, I wish to point out that the AFA did not strategize to slow contract negotiations so that American could go first. Covid slowed down early contract openers. Once we came out of Covid (for the most part) AFA was eager to get negotiations underway. AFA secured conference rooms in neutral locations and the company would cancel those pre-planned negotiating sessions at the last minute. When the company finally showed up at the table, the company had sent mid-level managers who had no negotiating experience. It wasn’t until AFA requested the help of a mediator sent from the NMB that things started to get moving. The company upset the NMB-appointed mediator who gave the company a stern warning about wasting everybody’s time. The bottom line here is that the company demonstrated no interest in negotiating with AFA until the appointed mediator joined the negotiating sessions. There are too many give backs and trailing edge wage increases to make this new TA palatable to vote yes for. I sense that it will fail to ratify by a fairly wide margin.
Seems like that union really went to bat for the company
jetsetter,
thanks for taking the time to write but, honestly, how can you call Kirby a visionary when he is pursuing the further plundering of UA’s FA contract?
It really does not take much of a visionary to generate profits off of the backs of employees.
and, as I have noted before, UA has clearly decided which employees they are willing to pay well – and that is the pilots -and the FAs are in a different class of employee. It will be interesting to see how the mechanics fare but I doubt they will see a great contract; they voted down a TA that was highly concessionary.
the real question is how UA will move forward w/ a highly demotivated workforce. Employees simply don’t care about the rah-rah chats from HDQ if the employees themselves can’t see that the company’s wins are the employees’ wins.
I wish you well but I still think that the great momentum that UA has enjoyed is coming to an end.
and, Gene,
DAL and UAL stock is both down virtually the same amount since the beginning of the year.
As I have noted, UA is living off its success in 2024 and the further 2024 is in the rearview mirror, the more UA’s lead falls.
and UAL is still worth just 80% of what DAL is worth as companies.
@Tim Dunn — I just wanna compliment your use of ‘bamboozled’ above. *chef’s kiss*
@Jetsetter, nice analysis of the TA. If it is rejected, do you think that the union can do substantially better?
Gordon Bethune, from Continental Airlines and Herb Kelleher, from Southwest Airlines, both proved that when the company takes care of its employees, everyone wins!
Another cesspool of comments by self appointed know-it-alls.
Well as long as they’re not near the housekeepig closets.
John Ferrari, you have summarized it nicely! Thanks
AFA United works for and serves Scott Kirby and that’s why there are so many oops we didn’t mean to put that in there and oops that’s not what it means from The AFA and Sara Nelson. Scott Kirby asks for concessions then the union lies and says they are not concessions. United twists the wording and then AFA says we will file a grievance knowing they won’t win it because United got the exact language in the contract they needed. Rinse and repeat. I must say if you’re a flight attendant and you vote for this you’re an idiot.Unless you’re just trying to make your exit strategy
Oh, so you complain about quality of service you might (not) get from a hotel?
Now you might think how your customers feel about your (lack) of service every time.
@Jetsetter Thanks for the input. I freely admit I don’t understand all the nuances of being a FA, but it seems the deal you have is really good! For example, using a 8 hour workday, 480 hours of flying is only 60 days of work a year. I know there is a lot of time at work not flying, so if we doubled it…or even tripled it a FA is only working 6 months a year to get medical benefits! My portion of my medical is $700, so again your $350 doesn’t sound bad! My company match to my 401k is 5%, so your 8% sounds fantastic!
I don’t begrudge anyone a higher salary or better benefits, but its always good to look around the room and see how many non-union employees fare in the workplace.
It’s not just airlines….
The people at the top are squeezing every last dime out of the rest of us.
#FightBack
Has anyone considered the safety of the crew?
In my early Carter, I had to (corporate ) stay in massive s**t holes that were “tenantabke.”
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago; not readily scared. But.
Jacob,
you are probably right but FAs and other employees pay dues to someone that is supposed to represent them in getting better pay and benefits.
The airline industry is replete w/ examples of employees that have grown so frustrated w/ their relationship with mgmt that they take it out on customers
UA’s earnings of the past several years was only possible by underpaying their people but the co. kept the rah-rah messages going hoping that UA employees would become so enamored w/ the success of the company that they would forget that it is UA’s own employees that are making UA’s success possible – at those employees’ personal costs.
It is clearly obvious that UA cannot keep its recent financial success going if employees aren’t onboard.
There is a high risk the wheels start to come off and all of this discussion about how UA is going to eat AA’s lunch might be more than premature.
Unhappy employees have many more, some worse, options then strikes.
If United flight attendants got hotels to match their execrable level of service, they would be staying in hotels that charge by the hour.
I can’t believe the whining here from the very worst flight attendants in the world. Even American flight attendants are better. They should be glad they have jobs at all, because the attitudes and complete lack of work ethic I observe every time I fly would make them crap employees in any business.
As a former airline employee, I would like to add that putting flight attendants in 2.5-Star hotels for layovers is a terrible idea. For example, if the pilots get to stay at the Grand Hyatt at DFW, then the flight attendants should be up there as well and not be forced into the Comfort Suites off airport property. That would sew further class divisions between haves and have-nots, and create resentment that could boil over into inflight service outcomes. All flight crew are in it together; there is no camaraderie in being split up.
Jetsetter has it right on the mark unlike the author and the rest of the usual suspect axe grinders. The UA flight attendants have done a fantastic job serving their customers even as contract talks have dragged on and the data (NPS) prove it. They deserve a great contract and if it takes an overwhelming no vote like the pilots, then so be it. The parties will work it out.
Since Kirby and his network team arrived at United has become one of the two most profitable airlines serving the most destinations with the largest mainline fleet (1,036 aircraft) in the world. Unlike the other majors UA didn’t prematurely park planes during the pandemic, in fact they ordered more (691 on order) at great prices and at the front of a VERY long line for airliners. Kirby has increased the UA fleet size by 40%. United owns significantly more aircraft than the other Big 3 airlines and the same percentage as Southwest while investing $30B in the product and producing industry-leading profitability. Unlike AAL, DAL & LUV, UAL maintained its earnings guidance and recently reaffirmed it for Q2 in the middle of the original range. Finally, United reiterated that its guidance includes the increased expenses associated with the AFA tentative agreement (not a contract) and the other anticipated contract costs. United Airlines has never been doing better.
JL
all that horn tooting and the real point is that UAL’s profits and growth have come at the expense of labor
and
UAL got huge discounts on its follow-up MAX and 787 orders because of delays in delivering the first batches of aircraft that UAL had ordered – and Boeing is nowhere near filling the first orders and United now has enough planes on order to take them well into the 2030s.
and Delta has taken delivery of more new Airbus widebodies in 2024 than any other US airline and will do so again this year – and are retiring older aircraft in addition to growing its network.
UAL’s growth has not only come off the backs of its employees that will push back sooner rather than later if they are left out – as appears increasingly likely to be the case – and UAL has also simply pushed out fleet modernization that other airlines have been doing.
and that’s before you get to the airspace and airport congestion issues including in NYC that are leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue shifting from UA at EWR to LGA and JFK – part of why UA is seeing the revenue walls closing in
UA has earned industry-leading profitability while making $30B in product investments including paying cash for airplanes and owning 86% of their 1,036 aircraft mainline fleet which gives them all enormous financial flexibility going forward. And 691 aircraft on order, amazing! And unlike AAL, DAL & LUV United maintained their earnings guidance while stating the increased expenses of the AFA and other potential contracts is included.
Sorry, you’re dog don’t hunt.
back in the day, at least here in the SW, it was generally understood, La Quinta was Spanish for Denney’s. Let La Quinta avoid having to build and operate 24 hour restaurants.
Friggin lawyers.
How is counsel defining “Business Class”? And Tenantable Condition?
Anything written / reviewed by a lawyer is purposely written as vague as possible so two other lawyers can potentially and (lucratively) argue over it in the future. Guarantees an income stream of litigation in the future for all lawyers.
Think about that for awhile.