DALLAS — The frustration between airline workers and management is hitting highs just as travelers prepare for another busy travel stretch over Thanksgiving when carriers could be once again pushed to the maximum of their operating limits.
American Airlines flight attendants and Southwest Airlines dispatchers plan to picket at Dallas-area airports this month, hoping public pressure can break a stalemate in ongoing contract negotiations.
The picketing comes after a tumultuous month of negotiations between pilots and management at United, Delta and Fort Worth-based American Airlines that’s resulted in three rejected deals and a threat to strike from one pilot group.
It’s a proverbial perfect storm of labor difficulties as airlines prepare for any actual winter weather that could disrupt holiday travel over the busy Thanksgiving and Christmas stretches.
Across the industry, airline workers are picketing at airports, complaining about slow negotiations and threatening to strike. None of the pickets should disrupt airline operations. Airline workers are prohibited from striking without approval from federal mediators. And the last time an airline group tried to strike in 1997, President Bill Clinton ordered American Airlines pilots back to work after only four minutes.
Still, employee frustration is not good at an industry relying on workers to handle a complex, nationwide system carrying millions of passengers each day.
As for worker demands, the refrain from unions is the same. Employees are tired after 18 months of holding together understaffed airlines, fundamental changes are needed to fix broken scheduling systems and workers need more pay to keep up with inflation and make up for years without raises.
“Every single flight attendant out there is going to say probably close to the same thing,” said Julie Hedrick, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants representing 22,000 workers at American. “They’re being worked more than they were pre-COVID and they’re tired, they’re really tired.”
Airline workers’ fatigue stems from many of them stepping up through the COVID-19 pandemic when airlines trimmed payrolls and then raced to hire back workers when demand returned unexpectedly fast.
American Airlines flight attendants plan to hold information pickets Tuesday at DFW and nine other airports, including Charlotte, New York, Chicago and Miami, where the carrier has the largest employee crew bases.
It follows informational pickets already this year in North Texas from pilots at American and Southwest Airlines and flight attendants at Southwest.
Hedrick said American is adding about 100 newly hired flight attendants who just completed training, but that the company is struggling to add net employees because so many are quitting, retiring or getting fired.
“They can’t just keep up with the attrition,” she said.
At Southwest Airlines, nearly two-thirds of the entire company’s workforce is negotiating new labor deals including pilots, flight attendants, ramp workers and customer service agents.
“We’re in mediation with both our pilots and our flight attendants and I’m hopeful that helps and it helps move us to a deal sooner,” Southwest CEO Robert Jordan said in late October during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “Because again, I want to get contracts, and we’d love to get them soon with our awesome employees.”
It’s unusual for there to be so many airline union negotiations all at once, said Gary Peterson, vice president for the Transport Workers Union, the umbrella group for many of the labor groups at American Airlines and Southwest. That’s because airlines and unions put off negotiations during COVID-19 as the industry faced uncertainty about what the financial situation would look like in the years that followed.
Not only are airlines having to take the unusual step of competing against one other to get contracts, but they are competing against a job market tilted in favor of workers and against climbing inflation. Once coveted perks, such as flight benefits, have been harder for employees to use because they are competing with leisure travelers while load factors on planes are near all-time highs.
“Airlines just assumed that they were gonna be able to get people to come back into these jobs and the labor market itself is tight,” Peterson said.
Pilots in particular are empowered by the simultaneous negotiations, as American, United and Delta all rejected deals within a week that promised pay raises up to 20%, Peterson said.
While pilots and flight attendants have drawn the most attention, smaller groups of workers such as customer service agents, dispatchers and meteorologists are having just as much trouble coming to new labor deals.
TWU Local 550 representing Southwest’s 400 dispatchers and 10 meteorologists has called on members to picket at Dallas Love Field on Nov. 28 – the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.
“We would like to have an industry-leading contract and that would mean a pay raise in the neighborhood of 20% to 25% right off the bat,” said Brian Brown, TWU Local 550 president.
Southwest’s dispatcher group, which coordinates with pilots and air traffic control to route every flight, has shrunk with downsizing during the COVID-19 pandemic along with retirements. Brown said mandatory overtime is at an all-time high.
The dispatchers union is approaching four years of negotiations.
“Overtime is great at face value, but there comes a point where enough is enough,” Brown said.
As mandatory overtime and overwork emerge as prominent issues in union demands during this latest labor cycle, Brown admits that some members just aren’t motivated to work as much overtime.
“Since COVID, there has been a shift to personal time and family life across the world,” Brown said. “People want more time at home.”
But Brown said understaffing is making it difficult for people to take a vacation or sick leave without burdening co-workers.
“People getting sick and covering vacations and it falls on the other people to pick up those shifts,” he said. “The overtime is out there but there is an inability for us to cover those shifts.”
