Boarding Pay Background
April 27, 2022 — Crew were specifically exempted from the Fair Labor Standards Act with regard to pay for hours worked. We had to fight hard to turn this job into a career. The pay is traditionally based on pilot pay structure & we’ve fought hard to increase the $ for flight hours w/ pay protections. But boarding is often the hardest part of our day & it’s only gotten harder this year.
We had negotiated the concept of boarding pay in contracts like United Airlines prior to 9/11 with a small dollar amount and we planned to build on that in the early 2000s, but bankruptcies resulted in stripping out even this small dollar boarding pay. Our demand to change this at the bargaining table hasn't had a chance to move forward as we spent 20 years post-9/11 and through the mergers just fighting to keep what we had before. The good news is that we are getting back to the bargaining table now and due to the #WorkersFirst Payroll Support Program that protected our jobs and paid a portion of our wages and benefits for 16 months during the pandemic, we are not in another post-crisis austerity mode. We are finally getting back to the bargaining table this year and we can advance our demands in negotiations.
Delta obviously announced half the hourly rate for boarding this week because Delta Flight Attendants are organizing to form their union, and their efforts are picking up a ton of momentum.
Good! We’ll keep the pressure on and lock this in with a contract at Delta and a firm foundation to achieve full pay during boarding. Delta can’t retaliate against Flight Attendants voting to join our union, so everything they improve now to try to keep Flight Attendants from gaining the right to collective bargaining only sets a stronger foundation for first contract negotiations. This is good for Flight Attendants everywhere.
