Mark Oprea
United flight attendants are striking at Cleveland Hopkins Airport on Wednesday.
Last October, Miranda Beal led just over a dozen of her fellow United Airlines flight attendants and pilots to Door 6 at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
They carried yellow signs denouncing “corporate greed.” They chanted for higher wages, pointing to the company’s $12 billion in profits in one quarter compared to workers’ usual wages.
“Year after year, they’re making record sales,” Beal told Scene at the time, referring to United’s executive team as pickets chanted behind them. “So we’re here to demand that United come to the negotiating table in good faith.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, United had not yet appeased Beal and about 27,000 of his other flight attendants across the country.
At around 1 p.m. today, Beal, along with pickets at 26 other airports in the US and the UK, announced that the tens of thousands of workers had had enough of their inactivity. For the first time in 19 years, they were ready to strike – if necessary.
“If we feel like we’re at a dead end and they’re not giving us what we need,” she clarified, “then we have no choice.”
Among the 24,700 eligible members of the United Association of Flight Attendants, Beal’s opinion was largely unanimous: “99.9 percent” of them, Beal told Scene a few minutes after the announcement, voted for a possible strike.
Mark Oprea
Flight attendant Melinda Beal announced the authorization for a strike at 1 p.m. Wednesday. It was the first time since 2005 that the AFA authorized a strike at this level.
As the yellow signs warned on Wednesday – “PAY US OR CHAOS” – the main demand blaring from Door 6 was higher pay. According to ZipRecruiter, a flight attendant in Ohio earns an average of $33,700, or about $16 an hour. United CEO Scott Kirby earns about 30 times that, or about $1 million a year.
If the AFA pickets do indeed receive approval from the U.S. National Mediation Board and do not hear from United management by the end of September, it is likely that they will strike. And not in the usual way. Flight attendants and entire staff would use their so-called CHAOS (“Create Havoc Around the System”) approach, a type of blitz strike method in which specific flights are targeted at the direction of the union leadership.
“Or we could just shut everything down,” Beal suggested. But “we really, really hope we don’t have to initiate the strikeout. We urge United to come to the negotiating table.”
Although participants in Wednesday’s picket were unclear about what they wanted to see in detail in a revised contract, many recalled the last successful negotiations in 2021.
But a lot has changed since then. Food prices have risen by almost 20 percent. An apartment that costs $750 a month now costs $1,100. Gasoline now costs an average of $3.50 per gallon.
“We’ve seen tremendous inflation during that period,” United pilot Ed Higgins told Scene during the demonstration. “We’ve seen the cost of living increase. United has made record profits, and United flight attendants have nothing to show for it.”
United Airlines has not yet responded to today’s news. As Beal said, they have until the end of the 30-day “cooling off period” to respond.
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