Day of Action

Tuesday, April 6th, marks one year that my union, the Association of Flight Attendants, has been in contract negotiations with my airline. Our contract, under which we’ve been flying since 1996, became amendable in January, and the airline has refused to meaningfully participate in contract negotiations until they can get our union to agree to certain “cost saving” concessions. Like all front-line employees, we agreed, in 2002, to pay cuts and major work-rule concessions to help the company survive what would become the longest bankruptcy in airline history and, while management pay and benefits snapped back to pre-bankruptcy levels during bankruptcy (and far exceed pre-bankruptcy levels today), we have yet to get anything back. We have now been out of bankruptcy for four years, and the company has benefited from the cost savings negotiated during bankruptcy for eight. Because most of these “cost savings” have gone directly into the pockets and stock portfolios of our (laughably mis-named) “management” team, angry flight attendant are prepared to stand United against the notion that we must make any further concessions. And on April 6th, at airports around the world, flight attendants will be picketing and leafleting to let passengers, management, and anybody else who will listen know that we are prepared to do Whatever It Takes to make improvements to our contract.

Not everybody understands such a militant attitude during “these economic times.” We’re “lucky to have a job,” according to many, including our management team and even many flight attendants. I’ve heard and read similar comments about the British Airways cabin crew and Lufthansa pilots that are striking in Europe to improve their working conditions, too, but what I don’t understand is why only the front-line workers are so lucky to be here. Management continues to swell their ranks and award themselves huge bonuses and incentives, and it sure seems to me like the management team that drove the company into bankruptcy in the first place and then wrangled themselves huge bonuses for getting it out (after a record-setting stay) should consider themselves pretty damn lucky, too.

How lucky are you, really, to have a job that requires you, as our company’s new contract proposal would, to be on duty, in uniform and accountable to the company, for 17 hours a day, but only has to pay you for 8 of those hours at the most? A job in an industry where fatigue is a well-documented problem with fatal consequences that wants to reduce your rest period between 17-hour duty days to 8 hours? Eight hours of quote-unquote rest which, incidentally, would include passenger disembarkation, waiting around for the hotel van, driving up to 30 minutes to a hotel with no restaurant, getting ready in the morning, driving 30 minutes back to the airport, going through security, and boarding the airplane 40 minutes before departure. Where, exactly, is the resting part? Five hours of sleep would be hard to get, and then a passenger’s going to come up to you 13 hours into your next 17-hour day and attack you personally because his carry-on won’t fit in the bin, which you are then supposed to graciously help him stow. Let me know how that goes, and remember (cuz you’re gonna want to): it’s against the law to pop the guy in the mouth.

People expect air travel to be affordable, accessible, and reliable; we want to be able to go where we want to go when we want to go there ⎯ isn’t it my right as an American to be able to go to Orlando every time I can string a three-day weekend together? ⎯ and we want it to be cheap. Passengers, first-timers and frequent fliers alike, shop from website to website for the lowest fare, even if it’s a difference of a couple of dollars; everybody does. But then when it’s boarding time, suddenly $149 entitles everybody to smiling, willing flight attendants, eager to provide snacks that no one wants to pay for and blankets and pillows that no one wants to pay for; flight attendants anxious to lift and stow everyone’s too-large, too-heavy carry-on bag and turn every center seat into an aisle seat and ensure that there are no crying babies or fat people around to irritate or infringe on what amounts, after all, to public transportation. The notion that the passenger is entitled to Pan Am service at People’s Express prices, but the crew is “just lucky to be there,” does not fly with me. At all.

Understand: this is still, on the whole, a good job. We get to work a varied and flexible schedule with a constant variety of new people, we get to travel and see the world (or, at least, Arizona and the Midwest), and we are virtually unsupervised. In some months, we have more days off than you do. But we are at (some would say "past") the limit of what constitutes reasonable compensation. Compare our work days: When I go to work a domestic schedule, my current contract allows me to be scheduled for a 13-hour duty day, and allows me to work as many as 14.5 hours in irregular operations, such as in the event of a weather or mechanical delay. Mind you, our flight time is limited to 8 hours a day, and we don’t get paid for time on the ground. So on a given 14.5 hour duty day, I am lucky to get paid for half of those hours, and am often paid for less. I am in uniform, accountable to the company, and not free to leave the airplane or airport, but I am not getting paid. Last month, a passenger had a seizure on one of my flights and fell on top of another passenger. Shortly after I arrived on the scene, the passenger turned purple, went still, and fell to the floor. Another flight attendant rushed me the AED, I cut off the passenger’s shirt, and was preparing to apply the pads of the defibrillator to his chest when he regained consciousness and, thankfully, started breathing again. As it happened, we were still at the gate in San Francisco, boarding the flight to San Diego, and so, while the crew responded to an emergency as they were expected to and as they are trained to do, not a one of them was paid for doing so. We give a little, we expect to get a little.

We are not asking for more than we deserve. We are standing up for our right to a Piece of the Pie. A pie we helped bake, incidentally, and for whose ingredients we (along with other front-line employees) shouldered the bulk of the cost. We are simply saying that when the money comes in, thanks in much larger part to our efforts than any of management’s, we should get our fair share of it. We made sacrifices during bankruptcy. We gave up work rules. Oh, we cut costs. Our executives took away our pensions (in the largest renunciation of pension obligation in history), but kept their own. Front-line employee pay cuts went almost directly, dollar-for-dollar, to “Key Employee” retention bonuses for the management team that had driven us into bankruptcy. Our CEO took home a bonus that could have given all flight attendants a 10% raise as a reward for his performance during a period when the value of our stock went from $50 a share to $3. Management laughed ⎯ there are reports of actual dancing in the hallways ⎯ in 1996 when our union ratified the industry’s first ten-year contract, and we have been working under that same “ten-year” agreement for fourteen years. Except we’ve taken cuts to our pay, benefits, and work rules in the meantime. They pay me less money to work longer hours and be away from home more often. There’s your cost savings. I don’t need to give up more than that. We are working for 1994 wages. Our executives certainly aren’t taking home what they took home in 1994, and probably neither are you.

We are not trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. But there is always money when it comes time for executive bonuses. The bonus that our management team gave themselves when we exited bankruptcy made even the Wall Street Journal laugh, and since then all we have done is further eliminate front-line jobs vital to the daily operation while adding managerial and executive positions. We have fewer than half the number of employees we had on September 10th, 2001, and eight more executive vice presidents, complete with generous executive compensation packages ⎯ we’re not talking about eight volunteers. We moved our executive offices from a complex out near O’Hare airport that we’ve owned free-and-clear since the 1960’s to a glitzy, new office building in downtown Chicago from which non-executive employees with the temerity to enter are hastily escorted. My position is that if there is money for executive pay, stock, and bonus packages and ritzy new downtown digs, then there is money for improvements to my contract, too. I don’t understand why there’s no money to lay me over in downtown Chicago, but there was money to move our entire executive suite down there. Or, put another way, I do understand, and I reject the notion that their contributions to the company are more valuable than mine. Our CEO told the single passenger who spends more money on our airline each year than any other that if he didn’t like management’s handling of the employee morale situation, he was free to take his business elsewhere. Really? And he is supposedly more “key” to the airline’s success than I am? Doesn’t look good.

Paying workers less for working more is not the answer in a hard economy. When people can barely pay their bills, they don’t eat out, they don’t wander around malls, and they don’t buy cars, homes, or washing machines. The ripple effect across the economy can be devastating, and yet when the executive who makes the decision to just slash everybody’s pay and take the difference home as a bonus gets on the airplane and isn’t served dinner and isn’t offered a pillow and a blanket and is told yes, of course he can have a gin and tonic, you just can’t offer him any ice because there isn’t any, he’s affronted, and scoffs at “cost cutting measures” as a lame excuse. At a certain point ⎯ and most of us are there ⎯ you can’t afford to give up any more. I am prepared to fight for improvements to our contract, and you’d better believe I am chomping at the bit to strike. If a strike brings down the airline, then it brings down the airline. The necessity for, and the length and impact of, a strike is a decision entirely within management’s control, but I will not be intimidated by talk of biting the hand that feeds me. A job that takes me away from home more than 20 days a month and is going to work me 17 hours a day with no rest between shifts for, if I’m off-the-charts lucky, a 10% raise (on 16-year old wages) is no longer a job that I am lucky to have. You expect the service, you expect the professionalism, you expect the expertise, and more people than you would believe expect us to smile and kiss their ass throughout their travel experience. Why are we expected to do it for nothing? If we really believe as a culture that only executives are worth rewarding and the rest of us are just lucky to get what we get, then let the airline crumble. If you’re going to erode the quality of my work life to the point that I would be better off working at the McDonalds up on Colfax and Krameria, then that might actually be what I’d rather do. Bring it on: I have a college degree, I speak three languages, and I have 15 years of the most intensive customer service experience on the planet; You were an executive whose personal level of avarice led to the complete failure of your company ⎯ let’s see which one of us gets hired first.

There are now 15,000 flight attendants at my airline (where once there were 23,000, see how we cut costs?); we make up a third of the workforce and less than 7% of the operating budget. We are not the problem. But, as front-line employees and, for the vast majority of our passengers, the “face of the airline,” we are in a unique position to be a huge part of the solution. And if we are expected to be instrumental in a return of our company to a position of profitability and prestige, then we deserve to share in the rewards. Only in the airline industry is this considered selfish and petulant behavior. You expect to be compensated at your job, and when you perform above expectations and bring profit, stability, and glad tidings to your company, you expect to be rewarded for it. If our executives can be rewarded for my performance (and they are, consistently), then so can I. I am scheduled to fly on April 6th and may not be able to stand physically alongside my coworkers and wave a sign to publicize our cause, but I am proud to be among the flight attendants who are ready to stand up and do Whatever It Takes to get the recognition ⎯ and the improvements ⎯ we deserve.