United Airlines Flight Attendants Massively Reject New Contract: “Resounding Message Sent to Management”

United Airlines flight attendants have resoundingly rejected a new tentative agreement that had promised big pay raises and a slew of other contract improvements.

A short time after the voting window closed on Tuesday afternoon, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) revealed that 92% of eligible crew members had taken part in the ballot and, of those, 71% had voted to reject the contract.

The union had been urging flight attendants to vote in favor of the contract, arguing it was an “industry-leading” deal that would edge United flight attendants just ahead of their peers at both American Airlines and Delta.

Estimated to be worth an additional $6 billion in value over the lifetime of the five-year agreement, a vote in favor would have seen flight attendants awarded a so-called ‘retro pay’ bonus averaging $21,500, while some veteran high-time flight attendants could receive as much as $50,000 or more.

Flight attendants would also have enjoyed an immediate average pay raise of 26.9% with new hire crew members set to see their hourly wages being hiked from $28.88 per hour to $36.92.

Veteran crew members, meanwhile, would have seen their hourly wage rise to as much as $84.78.

“I have told United management for years that under the cover, your frontline employees have not felt valued or respected,” commented Ken Diaz, the president of the United AFA council.

“Today, that vote sends that message. United flight attendants are demanding more, and now we will all join arms and fight together,” Diaz continued.

While United and the union are now more than aware that the tentative agreement they had bargained on for so many years isn’t good enough for flight attendants, they still don’t know exactly what areas crew members are most unhappy about.

The union says it will be running a survey to find out these answers so that it can then go back to United and demand more. A timeline for this process is yet to be set.

One of the big stumbling blocks could be the introduction of ‘boarding pay’, which is paid at half the normal hourly flying rate for the time that it takes to board the plane and push back from the gate.

Until this tentative agreement, United flight attendants weren’t paid anything until the passenger boarding was shut and the plane had pushed back from the gate.

Boarding pay should, therefore, be seen as a big win, but the union had previously been pushing for a concept known as ‘ground duty pay’, which would have seen flight attendants paid whenever they are at work but not flying.

The other big issue is that it has become an almost standard part of the bargaining process in the aviation industry for employees to reject the first tentative agreement they are presented.

In the last few years, we’ve seen flight attendants at American Airlines, Alaska, and Southwest Airlines reject the first proposed contract in a bid to win more value out of the agreement.

The AFA had warned their members at United that this isn’t necessarily a smart tactic, and additional value is rarely actually added.

From here, the AFA will need to work out what areas of the tentative agreement they need to focus on and then get help from federal mediators to resume bargaining with airline management.