Dramatic Concessions: American Airlines Flight Attendants Lower Demands to Avoid Strike
Flight attendants have significantly reduced their bargaining demands in tense negotiations with the American Airlines. The parties have been working this week in Washington, D.C. with federal mediators, and will continue to do so all next week, in front of a leaked deadline to wrap up a deal under threat that the government will release cabin crew to strike.
If the parties can’t come to a deal that does not mean there will be a strike. Even though flight attendants have voted overwhelmingly to authorize one, bargaining may continue if they’re close. And government permission simply sets of a 30-day period before they’re allowed to do so. The union has talked about targeted different flights each day, rather than a wholesale strike, to allow most members to continue collecting pay during any job action.
The Association of Professional Flight Attendants reports that American has increased its offer – as it said it would do, in light of raises announced by Delta – and that their most recent offer is lower than previous asks.
- They’re seeking a 28% increase at date of signing, boarding pay, and per diem increases.
- Separately they’ve reported asking for retro pay, covering increases they would have earned since their contract became amendable four and a half years ago.
- They report that their “combined pay and boarding pay proposal places our core economics higher than the Southwest deal, and above Delta’s current imposed work rules.”
There are two things that are striking about the offer put on the table by flight attendants.
- It’s much lower than what they had been telling union members to expect. They had been demanding an immediate 35% raise. The last raise flight attendants received was January 1, 2019. We’ve seen 24.5% consumer price inflation since then, so at this point with a 28% increase the union is mostly asking for an inflation-adjustment.
- American Airlines flight attendants would likely be lower-paid than non-union cabin crew at Delta. The union’s description of its offer is very lawyerly – their claim about being higher than Delta looks only at “combined pay and boarding pay” as the “core economics” of the deal for this comparison. It therefore does not include profit sharing. While American is offering the same profit sharing formula that Delta uses, American earns less profit and so payments are substantially lower.
Reducing their demands while telling members that their ask is better than what competitors are getting is a rhetorical reverse for the union. It means that – having gotten past union officer re-elections – they’re free to bargain realistically without threat to their lucrative positions (flight attendant union officers got better than a 40% raise as part of the imposed contract when US Airways took over American, which certainly didn’t hurt the company’s obtaining labor support for the deal).
American Airlines will certainly offer a signing bonus to flight attendants, but won’t want to do full retro pay covering assumed increases back to January 2020. No one would have expected them to, other than flight attendants themselves, until Southwest Airlines gave this in their recent new contract. The amount of any signing bonus may still be contentious. Per diem increases are, apparently, still an item under discussion. But as I noted a couple of weeks ago rhetoric had shifted and confrontations between union head Julie Hedrick and American Airlines CEO Robert Isom were mostly for show at this point.
Ultimately this has been a conciliatory union, recent rhetoric aside. It supported the US Airways takeover of American. It supported the return of attendance points as the pandemic waned, to ensure that members worked their schedules (to reduce the number of senior union members forced to work reserve). The union never even cried foul as the company furloughed more flight attendants than any other airline in the world during Covid. Surely they’ll reach an agreement with the airline – the question then is whether they’ll be able to sell it to the membership.
