US flight attendants push to be paid when planes aren’t in the air: ‘Most of our passengers have no idea’
US flight attendants push to be paid when planes aren’t in the air: ‘Most of our passengers have no idea’
wtf?
“We can fly upwards of 15 hours in a day and only get paid for three and a half. Our flight attendants don’t make a living wage,” said Becky Black, a flight attendant for nearly 22 years at PSA Airlines, which operates flights for American Airlines. “We have a flight attendant who lives in a homeless shelter. We have flight attendants that are living in crew rooms. We have flight attendants who are 30 years old and have to move back in with their parents because they can’t afford to live with this job.
capitalism. the problem is fucking capitalism.
🌏🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀 always fucking has been.
That’s wrong. You can be on duty 15 hours a day and only get paid 3.5 hours. She misspoke or the press got it wrong.
Unfortunately this is true (assuming the PSA block minimum is 3.5hrs) At jetblue it's 5 hrs, at spirit it's 4 hrs. Duty can be scheduled between 12-14 hours and extended upwards of 15 for delays.
Take the example of this fun little overnight trip, you fly one leg to Norfolk, sit on the ground for five hours (six and a half, but half hour deplaning, one hour boarding) then fly back. Your flight time (paid time) is 4hrs33 and your time away from base (time on duty) is 12hrs35
But dont panic folks, you can be disciplined at any point during duty time for your behavior, where you are, and uniform compliance :,(
(Edit: blurred some stuff in the pic)
I say the same thing, where "flying" is transit time between places, even if there's a layover. There's a difference being at home and "on duty" as in on-call and ready to go and being stuck in an airport for 10 hours because you're doing a Chicago-LA-Chicago return and stuck in LA because the shitter's broke on the plane you took there and need to get back to O'Hare.
Seriously, that person is not at home and not able to really have control over their own time because of their job. It's more than being just "on duty" in a sense that they shouldn't be getting paid.
Probably an ignorant question but if you go to work 15 hours just to go back to the homeless shelter. Why not just skip the middle man, and just not go to work?
Maybe they live in a state that requires working for medicaid?
https://www.newsweek.com/states-medicaid-work-requirements-map-2023330
If you have to be somewhere sometime for your job you should be getting paid, we need better unions
Yup. You should be paid from the moment you're required to arrive until the moment you're allowed to leave. That includes
The commute. Make employers pay an extra 2 hours a day and they'll be a lot more willing to let us work from home.
Of course, not all jobs can be done remotely, but this would free up traffic and improve the commute of those that have to work in-person.
My boss at my first job tried to tell me that i needed to be in and logged into my terminal by my shift start time
These terminals were like 15 years old, booted over the network and took at least 5 minutes to log in if they weren't turned off the night before. 8-10 mins if i had to turn it on as well.
I told him to do one.
Also if i was 1 min late for work they would dock 15 mins of pay and still expected me to work the remaining 14 mins unpaid, on minimum wage.
My fiances POW (a care home) does this too to this day
Carers should unionise, it's a highly exploitative sector
We just need a better government at this point.
Both sides need to stop going to bat for the people keeping them down.
Lol you should be allowed to clock in when you start your commute. These CEOs don't even want to pay their employees when they are on the clock and working.
Here's a fun fact. Vasquez Rocks is a common shooting location for Hollywood. Particularly Star Trek; my wife and I make a game of pointing out when they're using Vasquez Rocks for yet another episode.
The reason it's used so much is that it's an arid environment just outside the "studio zone". If they shoot within the studio zone, people have to pay for their own transportation and meals. If it's outside, the studio pays for all that. Vasquez Rocks is just outside the studio zone.
Slight correction, it's just inside the studio zone. Studios wouldn't prefer a place that requires them to pay more!
The reason it's used so much is that it's an arid environment just outside the "studio zone".
Vasquez Rocks is inside the studio zone, according to your link.
that fact is indeed fun
In theory that sounds good but I don't really get how it'd work. I mean what if you just lived four hours away so your commute there and back was just your eight hours? That's obviously ridiculous so what's the cut off? Like an hour? How does that affect breaks and lunch if you do live an hour away so you're only working six hours? Or is it just like a premium pay, like you earn 10% of your salary on your way in?
I wonder if any company actually does this.
Any company that does that likely uses a company vehicle as company property and demands you live in the specific area.
My old employer did that for our field technicians. You were paid from the second you left your home until you got back. If you had to stay overnight - then they paid for that too.
We hired people all over the US but we only hired people in centralized areas key to our customers. You were NOT allowed to change your home address more than 20 miles without sufficient approval. It would be grounds for termination.
My coworker lived in Alabama, and got some girl pregnant when they had him working in Philadelphia on an all-hands type of emergency . He decided to move to Philly to raise the child. You've no idea the amount of bureaucratic headache it took to stay employed.
My husband has to drive to different sites every day. He clocks in when he starts his car, and starts getting paid either an hour later or the minute he gets to the job site, whichever is sooner. So if they schedule him more than an hour from home, he gets paid for that extra drive time, which is nice. First hour is just expected commute.
Just tie it in with minimum wage reform that your "paid" hours start one hour before you are scheduled to work, and end one hour after you are "off the clock." Mandate a minimum of 40 paid hours a week for all employees, and no more then 12 scheduled hours within a 24 hour period.
If the CEO of the company you work for has to travel more than 30 minutes one way, believe it when I say they have it written in their contract that they are "reimbursed" for their time lost. But you? Eat the cost of not only your commute but your CEOs as well. Some even get a private jet to fly them to work and back every day.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/starbucks-new-boss-private-jet-b2600164.html
Of they live 4 hours away. Why are they applying for that job and why is that place hiring someone that fast away when commuting is a requirement.
I pay for food delivery, they should pay for labor delivery.
And believe it when I say, if the CEO of your company has to travel more than 30 minutes one way they have it written in their contract that they are "reimbursed" for their time lost. But you? Eat the cost of not only your commute but your CEOs as well. Some even get a private jet to fly them to work and back every day.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/starbucks-new-boss-private-jet-b2600164.html
Clocking in when you start your commute is a bridge too far in my opinion. If the company has no say on where you live then they could end up paying a person astronomically more just because they wanted to live far away. Like imagine an engineer who wants to live out in the mountains and commute 2 hours each way to work why should the company compensate them for that? Especially when you have another employee who is paying 2x as much in housing costs so they can live near work. Long term it would encourage people to live further from work which would just worsen traffic and suburban sprawl that nobody should want.
I would much rather see a housing incentive if a person lives with 3 miles of work so that people can have shorter commutes and the idea of walking/biking to work wasn’t unreasonable
My company's policy is that if you're traveling to other offices, that's paid time. If I go into the main office, but then midday have to drive 2 hours to one of our labs or something, it makes sense I'd be paid for that, right? Same with commuting during business trips. So, if I have the ability to WFH, how is it any different? I'm having to travel from one office location to another.
Are they driving for work? Or driving for personal reason?
Looks like the US flight attendants are following Canada's lead. Good on them.
Air Canada (AC.TO), flight attendants want to make gains on unpaid work that go beyond recent advances secured by their U.S. counterparts, a union leader said on Wednesday, in a fresh test of the way airlines compensate cabin crews.
...
New labor agreements at American Airlines (AAL.O), and Alaska Airlines (ALK.N), legally require carriers to start the clock for paying flight attendants when passengers are boarding, not when the flight starts to taxi down the runway. Those gains came after Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), whose flight attendants are not in a union, instituted boarding pay for its cabin crew at half of their hourly wages in 2022 when they were trying to organize.
If I have to spend time doing ANYTHING (including nothing) for your company against my free will. You will pay me.
I did not know this. It's a wonder anyone chooses to be a flight attendant at all. I know I would quit as soon as I found out they weren't going to pay me for the work I did.
Bunch of lazy freeloaders wanting to get paid for working.
This sounds insane, it would be like if every cashier had to greet customers at the door for free several hours each day.
Or they only got paid for the seconds/minutes they were actively checking out a customer. This is insane
This is something where there is no excuse but greed.
The wages of flight attendants are a drop in the ocean compared to everything else for operating a plane.
As usual, they attack the ones who can't fight back.
HOWEVER: Since we're living in Shitworld where we love rewarding greed and sucking off our oppressors, this could easily result in higher profits for airlines. What they will try to do is pay flight attendants while planes aren't flying, but then charge customers significantly more and argue that it's to pay the flight attendants while pocketing the excess.
What kind of people stay in a job like that? I would have to be pretty desperate and know that I was otherwise unemployable to keep showing up for a job that only paid me for a fraction of the time I was required to be there.
Because it’s still a “glamor” job, and it eventually pays OK after a decade + of work. Travel, travel benefits, don’t take your work home with you…if you’re good with people and can do the training it can be a good gig. It should pay better, but nobody gets paid until the door is closed and the plane pushes back. Not even the pilots, but pilot pay can be high enough to account for all the time at work outside the “door closed at departure and door open at destination” pay clock where the flight attendants are stuck dealing with passengers on a plane even if the door is closed sitting at the gate and they don’t get paid.
The greed in this world is astounding.
We really need to stop respecting businessmen.
Do you mean like work at Starbucks or Home Depot?
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/home-deport-responding-call-31-day-boycott-over-dei
https://www.newsweek.com/american-businesses-supporting-donating-donald-trump-list-2027957
The Home Depot was embroiled in whistleblower litigation brought under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) law. In July 2005, former employee Michael Davis, represented by attorney Mark D. Schwartz, filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the Home Depot, alleging that his discharge was in retaliation for refusing to make unwarranted back charges against vendors. Davis alleges that the Home Depot forced its employees to meet a set quota of back charges to cover damaged or defective merchandise, forcing employees to make chargebacks to vendors for merchandise that was undamaged and not defective. The Home Depot alleges that it fired Davis for repeatedly failing to show up for work.
Easy, not on the clock, I'm not working.
Edit: no I didn't read the article.
So the converse of that would be: on the clock, I'm working.
And since they're on the clock before and after the plane is in the air, they should be getting paid for that time. It's a fucking travesty that they haven't been until now.
Someone watched Canada and got an idea....
Go for it!
I've known about the fact they only get paid in the air for years. Nobody believed me. They also don't believe me when I say flight attendants are the dumbest, rudest, most narcisistic assholes I've ever met.
I work at the airport, and very rarely do I ever meet one that's even tolerable to be around. I've seen them trip little kids because they don't care where they're walking. In their eyes, the entire planet is their right of way. I've seen them cut in line at chic fil a in front of the whole line, with the logic being "Oh, I'll only be a minute". I've seen then stand in a group clump, making a wheelchair go AROUND them, because they were too self importsnt to clear a path for a guy in a wheelchair.
The best way to describe this situation in my eyes, is that they're a group in a sympathetic situation who deserve no sympathy.
All I'm saying is, if I was required to spend hours at work without pay, I would be an absolute prick at work as well.
Outside of work, too! Just an absolute miserable piece of shit 24/7.
It’s sad because I was totally on board with all of the points the comment above you was making and then you said what you said…
fuck the system!
I’d be a dick at work too
Wow. I work in aviation and have never witnessed the universal poor behavior you describe, nor the deliberate assault on people in the terminal. Flight attendants are people too and can have crappy days, but you’re painting with a really broad brush.
Only a select few would agree to work a job mostly for free. Apparently that select few are the desperate assholes you've described.
If the job/pay attracted people that had even an ounce of self worth, I don't think you'd see this trend.
Flight Attendant here 🤚 I haven't seen the behavior you describe (except cutting in line, I have seen that and it always made me uncomfortable, but most now just use the pre-order app). I have seen some level of asshole behavior from FAs, gate agents, rampers, pilots, cleaners. Oddly not maintenence or movers, but maybe I just dont get the time with them.
I've been in my role with my company over a decade, and noticed a pretty big culture shift during that time. When I started the gate agents and FAs would butt heads a lot; one work group was focused on everything they needed for a smooth flight and union protected so didn't mind advocating for themselves, the other group got reprimanded ending in loss of the job if the flight (or too many flights) went out late. Leadership introduced joint training between multiple workgroups and explained pressures of each role to other groups. It really improved teamwork. Now security/cleaners/pilots/FAs/gate agents are actually communicating, even if just to greet each other. It was toxic before.
I pretty much despise our corporate management but gave them the grace to call them leadership here because it is one good thing they've done, and it made a lasting impact.
Capitalism is such an incredibly failed experiment, and now those who privatized all the gains from it will hardly allow public discourse claiming as much.
Sounds like commie talk.
/S
Canada did it first!
I have Europe might have done it before us. 😄
Canadians just won their negotiations, so not surprising here. Canadians won by outplaying the Canadian carrier though, so not the same strategy.