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Flight attendants are a standard part of everyone’s flying ritual. They greet you as you enter the plane, they help you put your bags away, they even bring you snacks. But being the most helpful person in the sky isn’t an easy job. Passengers can be prickly, needy, and worse — in 2021, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant lost two teeth when a flyer attacked her.
An increase in unruly and violent behavior in the skies is pushing flight attendants to demand more — more pay, more protection, more support. While some attendants pull in salaries in the six figures after years or decades of experience, their younger peers have to fight hard to get to that level. Flight attendants at American Airlines, whose union just finished five years’ worth of negotiations for their latest contract, complained that some of their members had to sleep in cars and could qualify for food stamps because they were earning so little.
It’s not just American. There’s a seismic shift in unionization efforts going on in the airline industry. Attendants at Alaska Airlines and Southwest recently wrapping up new contracts, and negotiations are ongoing at United Airlines — whose flight attendants will soon be trying to hurry things up with a strike vote (that just got a big talking point). The white whale of flight attendant unionization efforts is Delta Air Lines. The last union vote there was in 2010, the third try in less than a decade, and a tally that failed on a 51-49 split — 328 votes blocked a union out of nearly 20,000 ballots cast.
“Delta’s culture is firmly rooted in taking care of its employees who, over the past two decades, have repeatedly chosen to reject union representation,” a spokesperson told Quartz.
Though the company has made some concessions to the labor movement brewing in its cabins — Delta granted its flight attendants 5% raises this year — it’s itching for a fight. At its most recent annual meeting, a shareholder resolution asked that the company stand pat if its workers wanted to organize. The company told shareholders to reject the measure, and they did, giving the greenlight to an anti-union campaign like the ones that stalled out unionization efforts at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama earlier this year.
But the Association of Flight Attendants has been trying to change that. In an interview with Quartz, AFA president Sara Nelson said that the airline could afford to do better by its flight attendants. “The organizing at Delta is critical if we want to move their careers forward,” she said. “Delta made more than all the other airlines combined last year. They should be leading the industry, and the flight attendants are very much recognizing that the pilots got 30-something percent increases and they got 5.”
The airline industry has been hinting that weaker demand and increased labor spending are making it harder to turn a profit even amid record passenger loads — Ryanair says the only reason it’s been selling more tickets lately is because of heavy discounts. But that’s likely not something the typical flight attendant wants to hear. On top of slow-going raises, many are still fighting long-standing industry practices like having to wait until a plane’s cabin doors shut until they can start earning their paycheck. Their battles are decades in the making.
A turbulent back story
The first airline flight attendant’s union was the Air Line Stewardesses Association, formed in 1945 by five flight attendants working at United Airlines. The union came to be at a time when labor unions were more commonly associated with male-dominated fields like steel work and car manufacturing. So it was historic when those first five women got 220 of United’s 287 flight attendants at the time to sign union cards, as Georgia Panter Nielsen’s From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant points out. Their first contract, ratified in 1946, got them their first raise since 1930 and created the system still in place today that allows flight attendants to have more autonomy over their schedules as they gain seniority.
The movement took off, and in 1949, the union merged with another flight attendant group, the Air Line Stewards and Stewardesses Association, and became a subsidiary of the Air Line Pilots’ Association. But in 1973, seeking more independence over their contracts, they broke off and attained their current form as the Association of Flight Attendants.
They’re now domiciled under the Communication Workers of America, one of the country’s largest labor unions, and their president is Sara Nelson. She started out as a flight attendant for United, and the industry’s post-9/11 financial chaos was one of her biggest motivators for doubling down on the union fight. After United declared bankruptcy in 2002 and her boss at the AFA told her that the airline was furloughing 2,300 flight attendants, she told The New Yorker that she remembers thinking, “Well, this is it. This is the moment that I’m committing. We have to fight like hell every single day to hang on to everything we possibly can.”
By the numbers
24,950: The number of American Airlines flight attendants represented by a union
25,803: The number of United Airlines flight attendants represented by a union
0: The number of Delta Air Lines flight attendants represented by a union
1,600: The number of flight attendants represented by a union at Endeavor Air, a wholly owned Delta Air Lines subsidiary
5: The number of hours many flight attendants work unpaid every day because they can’t clock in until a plane’s doors close (save for Delta and soon Alaska Airlines attendants)
3,000%: Increase in assaults on airline workers post-2020, according to one union official
$364 million: Amount of retroactive pay alone that Southwest Airlines flight attendants won with their latest union contract
Charted: Flight attendant pay has been grounded
Though flight attendants used to take home the same median weekly pay as the rest of the American workforce, that number has fallen behind since the COVID-19 pandemic began — which explains why they’ve been fighting so hard. They’ve been butting up against airline efforts to keep costs low, an expensive category that includes flight attendant paychecks.
One more thing
In 1993, Alaska Airlines flight attendants went on strike after three years of failed negotiations for a new contract. When talks ran aground and the company severely curtailed pay and benefits to gain leverage, the flight attendants responded with an innovative work stoppage campaign. Instead of doing one big strike, they decided to do a bunch of small, anytime-anywhere strikes on random flights that would make it impossible to know when a disruption would come. They called it Create Havoc Around Our System, or C.H.A.O.S. “If you fly Alaska, expect CHAOS,” was the message. The AFA, which represents Alaska Airlines flight attendants, has a trademark on the strategy.
Thanks for reading!
— Melvin Backman, Quartz reporter