American Airlines is facing yet another dispute with its flight attendants and their powerful union, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), after the Texas-based carrier decided to introduce a new performance tracking tool with no to little involvement from the union.
Flight attendants had no inkling that their performance was already being so rigorously monitored and measured until last week when American Airlines unveiled its so-called ‘Me@Work’ platform, which provides an aggregate overall performance score based on a wide array of metrics.
What shocked many flight attendants was that American Airlines had been quietly collating the data for months in order to provide an immediate ‘Me@Work’ score on the same day that the carrier announced the introduction of the platform.
For now, at least, ‘Me@Work’ isn’t being used to actively manage flight attendants, in the sense that a bad score shouldn’t lead to disciplinary action.
Instead, the platform is being sold as a method for flight attendants to monitor their own performance and give them insight into how their performance compares to their coworkers.
Metrics included in the overall ‘Me@Work’ score include customer satisfaction, flight delays attributed to flight attendants, a so-called ‘operational contribution,’ and other data.
Flight attendants at most U.S.-based carriers don’t have the kind of onboard supervision that crew members at many international carriers are accustomed to. There is no manager, per se, who has the power to coach or reprimand. Instead, all flight attendants on an American Airlines flight are coworkers of the same rank, even if one might be assigned the ‘purser’ role.
As a result, it’s probably no surprise that this new performance tool has come as a bit of a shock.
Given AA’s past relationship with its flight attendant workforce, especially during the extended time it took to lock down a new contract, you might think that the airline would have closely involved the union in the development of ‘Me@Work’ to prevent any pushback when it was introduced.
It turns out, however, that this wasn’t the case.
And now the union is making its thoughts on the tool clear. It appears that the union was at least made aware of ‘Me@Work’ before it was rolled out, but when it raised objections, the airline pushed ahead regardless.
“When it became clear that our concerns were not being adequately addressed, we moved forward,” the Dallas Fort Worth division of the APFA announced after it filed a Notice of Dispute over the ‘Me@Work’ program.
A separate memo from the LaGuardia division confirmed that the union was “receiving serious concerns from LGA members about how this system could be used.”
Some of the biggest concerns stem from how customer complaints could be used to downgrade a flight attendant’s performance, even if an investigation has found that the complaint shouldn’t be upheld.
Other flight attendants are concerned about the perceived one-sided nature of the data being used to track their performance, and how past tools that didn’t lead to discipline were now potentially being used to decide whether a flight attendant should be disciplined.
A flight attendant’s take
American Airlines is most certainly not unique in developing this type of tool, and similar systems have existed at many other international carriers for many years.
In every case, though, flight attendants have raised objections to how that data is collated. The most common complaint is how customer satisfaction scores are used to rate flight attendants, given that crew members have little sway on how a coworker could act on their flight, leading to bad scores for all the crew.
The other problem with customer satisfaction scores is that a passenger’s mindset can be massively affected by elements completely out of the control of a flight attendant: Frustrating delays, rude ground staff, chaotic boarding, a broken seatback screen, or a plane without Wi-Fi will all affect a passenger’s assessment of the flight, even if they are just asked to rate the crew.
