Pay cuts are the hot point for the American Airlines unions and particularly so for the APFA (flight attendants union).  The section 1113 hearings will move to abrogate those current contracts and unilaterally impose terms but that doesn’t mean the unions just have to unilaterally shut up and do nothing either.

American Airlines will still have a flight attendants union and will still be subject to NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and the Railway Labor Act.  In short, it still has to negotiate a lasting contract with the union and the union still can ultimately resort to labor actions against the airline.  All the Section 1113 hearings do is potentially kick the can down the street for a few years more.

If the pay cuts are significant (and they almost certainly will be) and affect differential pay in particular, at what point do flight attendants just leave the business?  It doesn’t happen very often today because seniority drives people to hang on.  Seniority equals higher pay.  Some flight attendants out there in the world did see the writing on the wall when it came to legacy airlines and jumped ship to other airlines such as JetBlue to start fresh and build a new career at a new airline.  Some just left the industry altogether but those are few and far between in general.

But at what paycut do we see AA flight attendants seek work elsewhere?  The interesting thing to me is that when flight attendants do leave the business, they generally move on to more financially rewarding jobs, not less rewarding.   Granted, the economy today isn’t friendly to the idea of shopping for a new career.  On the other hand, people are hiring and people are getting hired and there are plenty of jobs out there that could offer as much or more financial reward and quite possibly a better quality of life.

What also may be missed in this is that there is more incentive to jump ship for the junior flight attendants than the senior flight attendants.   Retaining high paid, senior flight attendants doesn’t exactly help an airline much and that is particularly true for American Airlines.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax