Sara Nelson: Unionizing Delta ‘Months Away’ Then She’s Going After Regional Airline Pay – View from the Wing

Sara Nelson, who heads the AFA-CWA union which represents over 55,000 flight attendants across various airlines, said that the effort to unionize cabin crew at Delta “maybe” could come “in a few months.” Speaking at the Skift Aviation Forum she made a number of interesting claims.

• Boarding pay was first introduced two years ago at non-union Delta as a true add-on, additional money to flight attendants. Previously cabin crew were generally paid only for time operating the flight. This is something that unions bargained for, and preferred because it meant higher hourly pay rates, and because senior flight attendants work fewer, longer flights and therefore spend less time boarding. It redistributed money from junior crew to senior crew.

  Sara Nelson says that Delta’s move was a response to union pressure. But if that’s true, then it proves the point that flight attendants at Delta are better with unions as a stalking horse than actually having (and paying for) one.

  

• Nelson says that boarding pay has expanded to other, new contracts since Delta’s move. And that’s partly true. Her union didn’t go for it at Spirit, saying it wasn’t actually that important.

  At American, a union base President explained that they got boarding pay instead of higher hourly pay. Some senior crew were very unhappy, then, with the choice to push for boarding pay.

• But Nelson says that union contracts have ben done at “better terms” – which is misleading because they are not at better pay. American’s contract, for instance (which Nelson specifically cites) adopts Delta’s boarding pay system and their profit sharing structure. It doesn’t adopt Delta’s profit sharing amounts because American doesn’t make very much profit.

  

• She complains about a ‘two-tiered wage system’ where regional airline flight attendants make ~ ‘45% less’ than counterparts at mainline.

  However, for the most part these are pay rates set by contracts that her union negotiated. And it’s precisely these contracts that let mainline carriers offload cost, and pay flight attendants higher wages at mainline. They’re effectively B-scales, and arguably appropriate for regional carriers operating planes with fewer passengers and without as much premium revenue as mainline whose revenue is augmented by long haul business class.

  

Ms. Nelson was dubbed the most powerful flight attendant in America by the New York Times. She could bark orders at Congressman Pete DeFazio when he chaired the House Transportation Committee. And she was probably most responsible for airline subsidies during the pandemic.

However, her influence may be waning after losing a fight to reform rules at her own union, losing out to run the AFL-CIO, and losing the most recent Presidential election – and not just because there will be a Republican majority on the National Mediation Board, but because Democrats were all-in on unions and unions didn’t deliver victory especially in swing Rust Belt states.