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On August 14, Alaska Airlines flight attendants overwhelmingly rejected a company-friendly tentative collective bargaining agreement backed by the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) union. Sixty-eight percent of the vote rejected the deal, with a high turnout of 94 percent of APFA’s 6,900 flight attendants at the airline.
The rejection of the collective agreement is a serious blow to the union apparatus, which had fully supported the so-called “record” contract. APFA President Sara Nelson, a member of the pseudo-left Democratic Socialists of America, had criticized the contract in an interview in Forbes in July.
In an attempt to rush through the agreement’s passage, the union opened the vote before the contract was even finalized, provoking angry demands from workers to postpone the vote.
“This is absolutely absurd,” one participant commented on APFA Alaska’s Facebook page earlier this month. “We still do NOT have a FINAL AND LEGALLY BINDING TA! Please answer the question many of us have been asking. … WHEN will we get it? Voting should not be open yet, let alone have a deadline to vote!”
The APFA responded cynically to the workers’ rejection of the agreement with Alaska Airlines by declaring: “This is democracy in action and the flight attendants always have the final say in any collective agreement.”
The rejection of the contract by Alaska flight attendants is part of a growing rebellion by rank-and-file workers against the union bureaucracy that seeks to impose corporate demands for mass layoffs, below-inflation wages and grueling working conditions. On Sunday, auto parts workers at Dakkota Integrated Systems in Chicago rejected a fourth starvation-wage contract pushed through by the United Auto Workers union, a record result.
American Airlines: “People, don’t be fooled and read the contract documents”
The massive rejection of the collective agreement with Alaska Airlines has led to growing opposition among American Airlines’ 28,000 flight attendants to the tentative collective agreement presented last month by the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA). The APFA imposed the agreement on the workers just weeks before the strike deadline expired. Voting on the collective agreement with American Airlines began on August 13 and will run until September 12.
American Airlines’ five-year contract proposal includes in-flight compensation, salary increases of 33 to 36 percent and back pay for the four years worked since the last contract was amended.
The deal is a company-friendly deal because these terms were essentially all already offered by American Airlines, with the exception of the retroactive pay, which was agreed to only after Southwest Airlines flight attendants received it first. In final negotiations, the airline only increased the offered raises by 1 to 3 percentage points, depending on seniority.
American Airlines flight attendants also expressed their opposition to the contract on social media.
“What about the working hours?” one commented on Facebook. “Do we get paid for all the time we spend at the airport??? What about the paragraph about cleaning the planes… I’d rather quit than clean planes. This collective agreement says a big NO, people, don’t be fooled and read the contract.”
Another pointed out that the pay rises were not appropriate given the sharp rise in the cost of living: “Five years ago, this would have been a reasonably good contract, but it does not keep pace with the current rate of inflation. This is not a pay rise at all.”
The contract has been the subject of fierce criticism, particularly from retired flight attendants. One wrote: “For me as a recently retired person, the retroactive payment is a slap in the face!! Why negotiate for all these years? Shameful!! Absolutely pathetic.”
American Airlines workers should follow the example of their colleagues at Alaska and vote no to the tentative agreement that would bind them to falling real wages and deteriorating working conditions for years to come.
At Alaska and American, but also at United (where a strike vote is underway) and Delta, flight attendants should form action committees, democratic organizations run and controlled by workers. Such committees would allow workers to communicate effectively with each other, coordinate their strategy across the company, and develop a list of demands based on the real needs of flight attendants.
Under the APFA agreement, flight attendants would earn $35.82 per hour (plus average in-flight pay of $2.94), which is barely more than non-union Delta flight attendants, who make $35.50 per hour (with $2.91 in in-flight pay). In the airline industry, it often works like this: One airline’s workers set the standard for wage disputes at other airlines, and usually result in wage cuts rather than increases.
Significantly, union bureaucrats receive 115 hours of “trip cancellation pay” under the TA and are able to actually take some trips, allowing them to count many more hours toward back pay than would be the case for a lowly flight attendant. These bureaucrats receive at least $33,000 in their paychecks.
Contributions and matches to 401(k) plans will increase by two percentage points for company contributions and 1.5 percentage points for company matches. 401(k) plans have long been a ruling class system for tying workers’ retirement savings to the stock market rather than offering defined benefit pensions, meaning many workers will have virtually no income when they retire.
Nor has the reserve system been improved. If American Airlines created a financial incentive to use fewer crew members as reserve by paying extra for those shifts, more workers could keep their precious days off instead of taking the required trips.
The TA would limit flight attendants’ ability to change work locations by allowing off-base flight attendants to pick up driving duties. This would reduce the incentive for companies to allow transfers to understaffed bases, as they would now have a “system-wide open time pool.”
Significantly, the contract does not provide for a return to pre-pandemic staffing levels for long-haul wide-body aircraft. American Airlines is continuing its workforce reductions that began at the beginning of the pandemic when passenger numbers plummeted, although those numbers have since returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Last fall, American Airlines flight attendants voted 99.47 percent to strike after being kept on the job without raises since January 1, 2020. The company justified the strike by citing hardships caused by the pandemic, and the APFA bureaucracy did nothing to address it. In the meantime, flight attendants were subjected to abusive and dangerous working conditions, including deaths and mass infections from Covid-19 and poisoning from toxic uniforms.
The APFA bureaucracy used provisions of the anti-worker Railway Labor Act (RLA)—as it did with Southwest and United flight attendants—to deny American Airlines workers their right to strike and force them into a never-ending cycle of pro-company mediation that can end with Congress and the White House forcing a previously rejected collective bargaining agreement on workers, as happened with railroad workers in late 2022.
Both American Airlines and APFA were clear that the union bureaucracy would not permit a strike under the conditions of the U.S. presidential election. Not only will APFA not allow a strike to harm Harris’s chances of being elected president, but the union will not allow a strike to hinder the ruling class’s war plans.
In fact, the Biden administration intervened in the American Airlines labor agreement and worked with the union bureaucracy to reach an agreement before a strike occurred. Biden welcomed the announcement of the deal, saying, “I thank Interim Secretary Su, Secretary Buttigieg, and other members of my administration for their efforts in helping both sides reach this agreement that avoids a strike that would have been devastating for the industry and consumers.”
The union apparatus claimed it did not want to risk the National Mediation Board (NMB) getting involved if Trump came to power again and appointed his own people to the NMB. But both capitalist parties have shown that they are united in their determination to oppress and exploit the working class. Biden and Harris have already shown that they are willing to use the reactionary RLA to strip workers of their democratic rights and impose management’s conditions on them.
This conspiracy between the trade union bureaucracy and the political establishment must be fought by the workers if they want to achieve their demands.
Workers must work to ensure that the tentative collective agreement at American Airlines is rejected by the largest possible majority. To prepare a fight against American Airlines and the APFA apparatus, workers must form action committees that give them the opportunity to network across companies and work sectors and fight for the common interests of workers.
