Collective bargaining for flight attendants at American Airlines ends without agreement, possibility of nationwide strike
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Contract negotiations between American Airlines and the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) ended on Thursday without an agreement.
“After years of negotiations, including nearly a year of mediation talks with the assistance of the National Mediation Board, and despite the union’s best efforts, American Airlines has been unable to reach an agreement that provides fair compensation to American’s 28,000 flight attendants,” said APFA National President Julie Hedrick. “Flight attendants will move the process forward to achieve long-overdue economic improvements.”
American Airlines also issued a statement on Thursday saying an agreement was “within reach” and that it looked forward to “planning further (discussions).”
Flight attendants at American are fighting for their first pay raise since January 1, 2019, when their last contract expired. They are also demanding retroactive pay for the period of delay in negotiations caused by lockdowns in the early stages of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The end of negotiations brings the 28,000 flight attendants one step closer to a nationwide strike. Flight attendants’ right to strike is severely restricted by the Railroad Labor Act, which also applies to workers in the airline industry. The act, first signed in 1926 and amended in 1934 and 1936, requires an extensive, complicated mediation process designed to prevent workers from striking. Under conditions where workers’ right to strike is severely restricted and controlled by the pro-business government, this inevitably leads to collective bargaining agreements that are advantageous to companies, as the law intends.
In extreme cases, arbitration ends with Washington directly enforcing labor rules through a no-strike order. This is what happened in the railroad industry in early December 2022, when self-proclaimed “worker-friendly” President Joe Biden signed a dictatorial law to impose on railroad workers a collective bargaining agreement that tens of thousands of railroad workers had previously rejected.
The National Mediation Board (NMB), which is overseeing negotiations between American Airlines and the APFA at this stage, has a flow chart describing the process, which states that American Airlines flight attendants could go on strike within 30 days if the state mediators allow it.
If the NMB declares an impasse and releases the APFA from mediation, it will next propose voluntary binding arbitration. If either American Airlines or the APFA reject binding arbitration, a 30-day “cooling off period” will begin during which the flight attendants will continue to work under the rules of the long-expired contract and will not be able to engage in labor actions such as strikes.
If an agreement is still not reached at the end of the “cooling off” period, the parties could be sent back to mediation with the NMB to begin a new negotiation cycle. Another alternative, which happened with the railroad workers in 2022, is that the White House could convene a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to propose a collective bargaining agreement. Only if none of these steps are taken at the end of the 30-day “cooling off” period would the flight attendants be allowed to strike. It is clear that the company and the federal government will always intend to use the endless provisions of the business-friendly RLA to never allow this to happen.
Even if a strike is allowed, the union does not have to call for it immediately. In 2022, railroad unions dithered for months after being excused from mandatory talks in September, giving Biden and Congress the time they needed to ban the strike before it happened.
The APFA has talked about targeting specific flights that could change daily, rather than committing to a general strike. This would be similar to the sham strike in the auto industry last year that affected only a few plants and resulted in a collective agreement that eliminated thousands of jobs.
The APFA claims this is only so that most flight attendants can still get paid because the union does not have the funds in a strike fund to pay workers during a strike. The union has also told flight attendants to expect credit card defaults in the event of a strike, suggesting that the bureaucracy is more willing to starve workers than provide them with enough to last through a labor dispute.
The union does not want to strike, is not willing to strike, and is trying to convince its members that it is in their interest not to strike. Ending a strike before it happens benefits management and the union bureaucracy’s close relationship with both management and the politicians on Capitol Hill.
This situation was deliberately created to show workers that it was in their best interest to capitulate to American Airlines management’s demands for austerity for workers and record profits for shareholders.
American Airlines management is well aware that it can rely on the APFA bureaucracy to delay strikes by enforcing the RLA’s mediation phases until workers either give up and accept a sell-out collective agreement or one is forced upon them.
There is an established pattern: airline unions drag out negotiations for years, wearing down worker resistance by accepting endless extensions and delays from management. A wholly inadequate collective agreement is finally announced in a hasty vote in which workers are given only the “highlights” of the agreement to make their decision. If the agreement is rejected, it is simply repackaged in further negotiations until the pro-company agreement can be whipped through the weakened resistance.
The last flight attendant strike in the United States took place 31 years ago, in 1993, when American Airlines flight attendants went on strike for four days. Since then, wages and working conditions have steadily deteriorated.
Instead of fighting a common struggle for better wages and working conditions, airline unions have ensured that airline workers are divided by their jobs and companies, and work under work rules based on different contracts with different expiration dates. Likewise, unions have separated airline workers from workers in other industries, including workers in other transport industries and parts of the world that have very similar conditions and struggles.
United Airlines and Alaska Airlines are also currently negotiating collective bargaining agreements for flight attendants that are intentionally tiered to benefit the airline’s management, with the lowest common denominator possible. They will try to drag out negotiations until American Airlines rips off its employees with the lowest collective bargaining agreement they can get workers to accept.
United and Alaska will then view this contract as the new industry standard and either beat it to show they are “industry-leading” or try to undercut it by using American’s “industry-leading” contract as an excuse. Either way, workers at all airlines lose in this scenario.
The fight at American Airlines will have an impact on the entire industry. American Airlines flight attendants must recognize this and join with other workers across the industry to fight together for fair wages and working conditions.
To achieve their demands, workers must resist this conspiracy between unions, employers and government. To wage this struggle, workers need their own organizations under their own control, in which they have a democratic say in their own lives.
These organizations are called rank-and-file committees, where workers can discuss their concerns and plan their struggles in a democratic way. Rank-and-file committees must then lead the broadest possible struggle, uniting workers from different airlines, industries and countries. Only by leading their struggles independently and united with other workers can they avoid betrayal by organizations with interests other than their own and achieve their demands.
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