After five years of labor disputations, American Airlines flight attendants are inching closing to an agreement with the airline regarding their pay in the next step in labor disputes that have lasted years.
The Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), which represents around 27,000 flight attendants employed by American, announced last week it is yet to reach “a tentative agreement” with the airline although claims to have “made progress”. There is still much to be resolved, including issues such as the date-of-signing wage increases.
American’s flight attendants are no doubt hoping that this will be mean they are in the final stages of what has been a very lengthy and fraught process of protracted union negotiations waged by APFA against the airline.
Prolonging their ability to reach a deal is the fact that flight attendants’ contract negotiations are highly regulated under the Railway Labor Act, which deems their work critical to the economy and therefore tightly proscribes their ability to strike.
The National Mediation Board (NMB) supervises talks. Last month Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Labor Secretary Julie Su joined for part of the negotiations. Over the past couple of months, the NMB – which has the authority to schedule further days or weeks of talks – deemed that the airline had made sufficient advances to make more negotiations warranted.
According to APFA, this is “both a good thing and a bad thing”: on the one hand delaying a conclusion and their right to strike, but on the other potentially putting more money into the agreements. The union itself admitted that the overhanging threat of a strike has drawn out these negotiations even further.
APFA says, “Underlying our bargaining is our request to be released into a thirty-day cooling-off period”. It has reasserted its ultimate goal to “take all steps necessary to push forward [its] right to strike”.
This bitter struggle for better pay has been ongoing since January 2019, when American’s contract with its flight attendants expired. They have not had a pay raise or cost of living raise in the half decade since, having so far failed to secure an improved contract through APFA.
So in all the time APFA and airline representatives have been wrangling in boardrooms, flight attendants at American have been working for pre-pandemic wages and under the stress of a potentially having to embark on a strike.
By contrast, peers at Delta have seen their wages raised multiple times in recent years: first in May 2022 and a further 5% increase in April 2023 to industry-leading levels.
In June, long after Delta flight attendants’ pay had been increased multiple times, APFA unanimously rejected an offer by American of an immediate wage increase of 17%. The union argued that flight attendants wanted a contract first: “APFA’s position has been Flight Attendants want and need a complete contract”. Meanwhile, Delta flight attendants are currently paid on average $5,400 per year more than their peers at American.
It’s notable, then, that Delta is the only major US carrier whose flight attendants are not unionized – and yet their quest for higher pay and benefits has been fairly short and painless compared to their counterparts at American.
And despite its apparent proximity to striking a deal, APFA may find itself in hot water at the conclusion of negotiations with American if it transpires the union has overpromised but ends up underdelivering. According to travel expert and View From The Wing blogger Gary Leff, the “outstanding question” is “whether or not a tentative agreement between American Airlines and flight attendants that falls short of unrealistic promises by union President Julie Hedrick will be able to pass”.
Meanwhile, as the first glimpses of light appear at the end of the tunnel for American’s flight attendants, a new round of labor talks looms for the airlines ground crew. .
35,000 fleet workers and mechanics – jointly represented by the Transport Workers Union and the International Association of Machinists and collectively known as “The Association” – are looking to negotiate new contracts with the airline.
According to TWU President John Samuelsen, “We’re going to be demanding significant wage increases and also protection of our work”.
There was a note of weariness to his announcement. It is well-known that the last round of negotiations was very lengthy: the association was certified as the collective bargaining agent in May 2015; the NME assumed oversight of the talks in 2018; and a tentative deal was struck in January 2020.
The negotiations were also increasingly bitter, resulting in a court battle and the grounding of a Boeing 737 MAX. Samuelsen said the union was looking to have a “productive negotiation to a fast settlement, not turn it into a massive confrontation like last time”.
Samuelsen’s hope for “negotiations where American Airlines isn’t going to destroy our livelihoods” is a prescient reminder for APFA, whose protracted negotiations with the carrier have been anything but a “fast settlement”.
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