Reminder that flight attendants only get paid while the plane doors are closed. All of the flight prep, onboarding, stowing baggage, deplaning afterwards, cleanup afterwards, etc is entirely unpaid.
Their place of employment is the airplane, they have duties that are required to be performed before and after passengers embark, they should be payed the moment they step foot on the aircraft.
It’s not legal for a retail store to not pay you while closing up the store, so why is legal for airlines to not pay attendant when the plane is open.
The funniest part of this is that there's approved union contact in place that agrees with this statement. How is it that both sides could agree to what appears to be illegal?
99.5% (with 93% of eligible employees voting) is a stunning number. But also one that tragically highlights how bad it has gotten. It's very hard to get so many people to agree on much these days. But they virtually all agree that the pay is too damn low.
In the second quarter of 2023, the company reported profits of $1.34 billion, with revenue rising to a quarterly record for the company of $14 billion.
It hasn't gotten that bad for everyone. What a broken system.
So AA has ~130,000 employees so at $1.34B that's about $10,000/employee. Seems like they got plenty in the old war chest to be giving out raises left and right so surely that's what they're doing, right?
TLDR: they can start striking as soon as 30 days, pending the cooling off period and regulator support. They are looking for an immediate 35% pay raise with annual raises of 6%