New flight attendants – faced with low starting wages, long hours with relatively fewer payable hours, and since 2019 no opportunity to renegotiate the wages of their contacts even as inflation has risen steadily – have to endure a lot of turbulence on the way to a financially stable career path.
An employment verification letter from American Airlines is circulating on Reddit, drawing attention for low starting wages for some newly hired flight attendants. The letter, which states that a new American Airlines flight attendant will have an expected annual salary of $27,315 before incentives and taxes are collected, has sparked conversations about fair wages for flight attendants and how inflation increases are making life unaffordable for many Americans — even as the economy and labor markets look good on paper.
The union representing American Airlines employees, called the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, verified the letter’s authenticity, CNN reported. This letter is issued for potential hosts or other services that require flight attendants to verify their employment and income.
Although the salary in the letter is above the federal poverty line of $15,060 for a single-person household, that figure does not reflect the true cost of living nationally, which can be much higher in large metropolitan areas.
The union has also advocated for the low starting salary, which for a single-income household meets the qualifying criteria for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamp benefits, in several states, including Massachusetts and New York.
The union is also drawing attention to a growing problem of “corporate greed” by drawing comparisons between the wages a flight attendant can earn and what the company’s CEO, Robert Isom, earns.
The starting salary for a new flight attendant is about $27,000 per year, which is just a fraction of the $31.4 million the CEO earned last year – an amount 1,162 times greater than a new flight attendant’s income.
American Airlines did not immediately respond Fortune‘s request for comment.
To be fair, there is a mixture of challenges between the union representing American Airlines flight attendants and management. Under a federal law called the Railway Labor Act, workers and union members in the airline and rail industries are not allowed to strike without government permission. Federal mediation groups, such as the National Mediation Board, could approve such a consent by declaring a deadlock in negotiations between American Airlines and the union group, or by allowing the union to pursue a possible strike.
The last contract the union negotiated was signed in 2014, according to a November update by the association, and workers have not received a raise since 2019.
“Flight attendants are frontline workers who must bear the weight of inflation without the compensation needed to keep pace with the industry,” the association wrote in a statement, adding that flight attendants’ quality of life “has a new collective labor agreement could be improved. ”
Recently, the union pushed for a new contract to increase hourly wages, joining flight attendants at other airlines, including United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and Southwest, who are making similar demands.
Ensuring that flight attendants are paid well is especially important because their work model involves many hours of unpaid work. On average, full-time flight attendants are only paid about 75 hours per month, and pay often only officially begins once the plane doors close, rather than compensation that also takes into account the hours they have to be at the airport or on board. airplane during boarding.
“One of the most stressful parts of the flying experience is during the boarding process,” the union wrote in a May 20 summary, adding, “but we are not paid for this work.”
Securing entry fees, the union wrote, “is an important step in addressing this historic inequity”; Other airlines have notably made these changes, albeit slowly. In June 2022, Delta Air Lines introduced an initiation fee for flight attendants, offering employees half their hourly rate during boarding, after facing the threat of a unionization campaign. However, Delta is the only major U.S. airline whose flight attendants are not unionized.
The union is now proposing a 33% wage increase capped at $91 per hour during the first year of a new contract, with wage increases of 5%, 4% and 4% for the remaining years of a four-year deal. It also calls for retroactive wage increases based on how many white-collar workers worked during the last five years of negotiations.
American Airlines “declined to waive a top rate of $76 per hour, plus initiation fees and other improvements,” the union wrote in the summary, but the company added benefits such as initiation fees, higher 401k matching contributions and profit sharing at the same rate. formula as pilots in its most recent contract proposal to the union.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
