United Flight Attendants Reach Deal — Top Pay Would Exceed $100 An Hour After 5.5 Years Without A Raise

After 5.5 years without a raise, United Airlines flight attendants and the company have reached an agreement on a new contract. That still needs to be ratified by the union and voted on by cabin crew. 71% of them rejected their last contract, with the union misreading many member priorities. While we don’t yet have full details, this new contract looks like it addresses many of the concerns that flight attendants had with the first one.

United is telling flight attendants that this offers them the highest wages at any U.S. airline. In fact, the most senior United flight attendants will ultimately earn over $100 per hour during this contract. Congratulations to the airline and union for getting this done.

• Flight attendants will get paid for ground time on long layovers.
• There’s more retro pay (signing bonus) that accounts for the long period of time since crew got their last raise – in 2020 – and saw the value of their wages since then eroded by inflation. This retro pay alone will cost United $740 million.
• And other language in the agreement responds to concerns they’ve expressed.

In an internal communication, United is describing the agreement as ‘balanced and competitive’ – their message all along has been that they can increase sit pay and other costs if they also get efficiencies in the agreement. We don’t know yet whether they got PBS (algorithm) scheduling or the right to own a regional airline.

Union priorities in the new agreement were:

• Pay for waiting on the ground between flights (sit time)
• Less tiring red-eye flying and more rest on longer flights
• No more layover notifications and better layover hotels
• Improvements for reserve flight attendants
• Improvements to health care and retirement benefits

We know so far that they got sit pay, improvements in redeye scheduling, and stronger language on layover hotels. The first was a promise the union had made to members originally, and that last was an omission that drove a lot of ‘no’ votes last summer.

Specifically, here’s how United is pitching the new contract’s improvements internally to flight attendants:

The union won’t make full language of the proposed contract available to flight attendants until April 3rd.

Here’s the timeline for members to vote on ratification: If they vote in favor they will start seeing improvemed pay in June.

This took a long time first because of the pandemic – not a good time for flight attendants to be bargaining – and because the union wanted American Airlines flight attendants to ‘go first’ in their negotiations, setting a higher bar from which to negotiate from. (Union’s union even lent their lead negotiator to American flight attendants, represented by a rival union.) Then, last summer, flight attendants rejected that first contract.

Cabin crew should be making more than the wages which were set in 2020. They should be earning industry standard wages. Whether they’ll truly make more than others in the industry likely turns on profit sharing language and the airline’s profitability. Profit-sharing has been the driver of Delta’s top of industry wages, and a pain point for American Airlines flight attendants who negotiated for Delta’s formula but an an airline that hasn’t been profitable.

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