Flight attendants at United Airlines have rejected a proposed contract and are now laying out their new list of demands, revealing frustration that goes deeper than missing raises.
One of the more contentious items is ground duty pay. Historically for flight attendants with United, pay begins only after the aircraft door closes and the plane pushes back. The union had sought full compensation from arrival to final duty release, but says the carrier offered only “boarding pay” in the previous agreement. It’s not clear that, especially in this environment, United will offer any improvement there, at least not without making other parts of the contract less valuable.
The rejection may be a bargaining tactic, but it embarrassed the union, which pushed hard for flight attendants to ratify the first agreement. Even so, the union says it is a statement by 28,000 attendants that they’ll accept nothing less than meaningful change. But as one AFA-CWA member put it in a survey reference: “The survey kept asking things like ‘Did you vote no because you should always vote no?’… They should be more concerned with what they did wrong instead of blaming us.”
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