A retired Delta Air Lines Captain on the carrier’s Boeing 767 fleet has filed a class action lawsuit against the Atlanta-based airline, alleging it repeatedly violated California wage laws by failing to properly break down the hours worked in bimonthly pay slips.
If the retired pilot prevails, the airline could be forced to pay up to $5.2 million in compensation to around 1,300 pilots who were based in California at the time of the alleged breach.
Retired pilot files lawsuit in California court
Calculating wages for pilots and flight attendants can be a complicated endeavor for any airline. Aircrew pay is made up of various hourly rates based on different duties, as well as different allowances and add-ons that can be hard even for season staffers to decipher.
But under California’s Labor Code, employees are required to provide the total hours worked in a pay period, as well as the applicable hourly rate and the number of hours worked at which hourly rate.
Retired Boeing 767 Captain William McMillan claims Delta repeatedly violated the California Labor Code by leaving these sections blank on wage statements sent to pilots based in the state.
In a recently filed lawsuit, McMillan says “pilots are injured by Delta’s failure to include this information on the wage statements because the pilots cannot quickly and easily determine from their wage statements the total hours worked in the pay period, the applicable hourly rates paid in the pay period, or the number of hours worked at each applicable hourly rate in the pay period.”
And while McMillan makes it clear that his lawsuit doesn’t accuse Delta of underpaying pilots, the lack of legally required information on their wage statements makes it incredibly difficult for pilots to determine whether they’ve been paid correctly or not.
Delta is updating IT systems but improvements could be years away
This issue isn’t something that has just cropped up, and, in fact, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) has been challenging Delta over pay discrepancies and the difficulties its members face trying to resolve issues for some time.
ALPA blames Delta’s creaking IT systems, and while the airline is now reportedly working on significant improvements, the union says it could be years before the software is brought up to date.
Bottom line
Like so many airline employee lawsuits that rely on state-level regulations, Delta Air Lines is likely to argue that the law isn’t applicable to its business as it is governed at a federal level.
If, however, a court does side with the pilots, Delta could be on the hook to the tune of $50 for the first violation and $100 for each subsequent violation. Those fines are pretty small numbers, but when multiplied across all of Delta’s California-based pilots, the total could quickly run into the millions of dollars.
