United Airlines was in high spirits on Tuesday as it reported its 2025 financial results, boasting that its performance beat Wall Street expectations after total operating revenue grew 3.5% year-over-year to a record-breaking $59.1 billion.
But while chief executive Scott Kirby was in a typically optimistic mood about how much United is winning, flight attendants say they feel insulted and let down by this year’s profit-sharing announcement.
This year, flight attendants at the Chicago-based carrier are set to receive a profit-sharing bonus equivalent to around 4.5% of their annual wages – marking the second straight year in a row that the bonus has been slashed.
In fact, this year’s bonus is around half that of the profit sharing that flight attendants received in 2024.
There is, however, a simple explanation for why the profit-sharing bonus seems so meagre compared to a couple of years ago. As part of an agreement that the flight attendant union negotiated with United, profit sharing isn’t actually based on the overall annual profit that the airline reports.
Instead, the bonus is calculated based on the difference in profitability year-over-year.
The reason that 2024’s bonus was 9.1% was that United was emerging from the doldrums of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as a result, the difference in profitability was much higher than what might be typically expected.
Nonetheless, this explanation does little to ease the frustration of flight attendants who are continuing to work under a contract that became amendable in 2021, meaning that crew members have been working without a pay rise for the past five years, even as the cost of living continues to rise.
Flight attendants who might have been counting on a profit-sharing to make ends meet will be left sorely disappointed, especially when they look at their peers at Delta Air Lines who are set to receive a profit-sharing bonus of 8.9% next month.
Delta plans to spend a total of $1.3 billion on its profit-sharing bonus, which it says works out to the equivalent of four weeks of extra pay for many workers.
American Airlines is expected to announce its annual financial results next week, and flight attendants at the Fort Worth-based carrier are bracing themselves for an even smaller profit-sharing bonus than at United.
At least American Airlines flight attendants working under an in-date contract that secure gaurunteed pay rises for the next few years.
For crew members at United, they are still facing months of bargaining to try to lock down a contract that both the airline and flight attendants are happy with.
Earlier this month, United issued a warning to flight attendants, saying that the demands from the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) werent realistic and would put the carrier at a “competitive disadvantage.”
The problem is that the two sides are now at loggerheads. United says that it will only concede improvements in some areas of the proposed contract if the union accepts concessions in others, while the union says all concessions are a non-starter.
Negotiations are slated to resume next month, although there are no signs that a quick solution to the current impasse will be found.
You mean only those who are maxed out on the pay scale have gone 5 years without a raise. Everyone else still gets their seniority based annual raises which average 10%… and that’s a heck of a lot more each year than most of the world gets as a raise.