United Airlines told every single one of its 30,000-strong workforce of flight attendants that they were being transferred to work out of London, England: The carrier’s last remaining crew base outside the contiguous United States and Guam.
Flight attendants certainly had a shock when they received the email on Wednesday, which notified them of their base reassignment. Some were over the moon with the news, but many others were left in shock at the unexpected base reassignment.
Surely the situation in the United States hadn’t gotten so bad that flight attendants across the country were being transferred to an overseas base… whether they liked it or not?
It soon turned out, however, that someone overseeing a highly anticipated base transfer to London had somehow managed to send a system-wide message to every single one of United’s flight attendants rather than just the lucky few who were actually going to transfer to the British capital.
Within 30 minutes, a follow-up email confirmed the mistake… much to the relief of tens of thousands of crew members.
United opened the once-in-a-decade opportunity to transfer to London Heathrow last month, although even some flight attendants who had been on the transfer list for years wondered whether they would be able to afford to live in London.
United has operated a flight attendant base at Heathrow Airport since the early 1990s, when it acquired the extensive slot portfolio of Pan Am when the iconic airline went bust.
More than 400 of United’s flight attendants are based in London, but opportunities for transferees from U.S. bases are incredibly rare. So rare, in fact, that the last transfer opportunity opened more than 10 years ago.
London Heathrow was one of several international crew bases that United Airlines operated, although that all changed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
United made the devastating decision to close flight attendant bases in Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, with the loss of 840 crew member positions.
The flight attendant union attempted to challenge the decision, but an independent arbitrator ended up siding with United.
In the end, the two sides came to a compromise agreement: flight attendants who already had the right to live and work in the United States would be transferred to United’s bases there, while others who had the legal status to work in the UK would have the preferential right of reemployment should positions open at the London base until March 2023.
Unfortunately, given that positions rarely open in London, most of the flight attendants on this reemployment list never worked for United again.
Although it might seem odd for United to operate a foreign crew base, the practice used to be very common, and a slew of other international carriers still have international flight attendant bases dotted around the world.
One of the biggest remaining operators of international crew bases is British Airways, which still employs flight attendants in Bahrain, Cairo, China, India, Mexico City, and Japan.
Australian flag carrier also has an international crew base in London, although the airline has been slammed over its decision to “offshore” Australian flight attendant jobs to Singapore from September.
The airline plans to employ up to 650 crew members in Singapore who will work flights between the city-state and several Australian cities. Qantas said the crew base in Singapore was needed to respond faster to flight disruptions and crew availability issues.
So your sensational headline – like always – proves to be untruth. You used to write for another entity and I stopped reading that service due to your wildly incorrect articles. Now, you’re hiding at this place – which I just unfollowed.
If you didn’t want click-bait readers – you should have titled this – UA mistakenly sent an email requiring all 30K flight attendant to move to London. DONE!