Skip to main content

Apparent Agreement Between Frontier Airlines & Flight Attendants Appears To Resolve Unrest


In recent months, flight attendants working for Frontier Airlines had started to make known their dissatisfaction with their rate of pay and the prolonged delay in ongoing contract discussions with their employer.  

There is quite a bit to unpack here, so let us start at the beginning and work forward from there.  Flight attendants at Frontier have a history of being among the lowest paid in the industry, with flight attendants working at Frontier for a year or less making a base rate of $19.25/flight hour.  In contrast, flight attendants working at Alaskan Airlines that have worked for a year or less earn a base rate of $21.31 - $22.38/flight hour.  Flight attendants at Southwest Airlines that have worked for a year or less earn a base rate of $22.36 - $22.64/flight hour.  Flight attendants at American Airlines that have worked for a year or less earn a base rate of $24.18/flight hour.  Flight attendants at Hawaiian Airlines that have worked for a year or less earn a base rate of $24.50 - $25.26/flight hour.  (Of note, flight hours commence once the plane door is closed.  Generally speaking, flight attendants are often paid only for flight hours.  Time spent packing for trips, getting to the airport, etc. does not count as flight hours.)  In the industry, anywhere from 80 - 85 flight hours per month is considered a full time schedule.  However, some flight attendants at Frontier are guaranteed only 75 flight hours each month.  Perhaps most concerning for Frontier flight attendants is the fact that the most senior flight attendants only make $33,489.00 per year.  In comparison, senior flight attendants at Spirit Airlines can make up to $43,380.00 per year.  As a result of this low pay, many Frontier flight attendants have taken to working overtime, taking other jobs to supplement their income, living with family or friends to save money, and scraping to get by each month.

Now as for the contract negotiations with Frontier, the flight attendants had a union representing them in those negotiations. That union, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, had been in negotiations with Frontier since the last contract expired in 2016.  (That contract had been in place since 2011, not longer after Frontier filed for bankruptcy and had subsequently changed hands over the past several years.). In principle, Frontier flight attendants wanted a new contract to include a pay raise.  With many Frontier flight attendants getting antsy about the delayed negotiations, in November of 2018, 99% of the union’s members voted to authorize a strike if negotiations continued to stall.  In fact, the union’s international president, Sara Nelson, announced earlier this month that if a new contract with Frontier was not agreed upon by March 20th, the union would demonstrate at Frontier’s headquarters in Denver.

Frontier does have a somewhat tenuous history in recent years with its employees.  In 2016, four Frontier pilots filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the grounds that the company did not provide them with an area to pump breast milk.  A lawsuit followed in 2017 when two Frontier pilots sued the airline claiming they had been improperly required to take unpaid leave in order to breastfeed.

With that being said, despite the prolonged delay in contract negotiations, word leaked out last week that a new contract had been agreed upon by the parties.  While Frontier has not commented on the status of any new contract, the flight attendants’ union stated that the new contract included a pay raise, schedule flexibility, quality of life improvements, and other benefits.  The entire scope of exactly what the flight attendants achieved with this apparent new contract remains to be officially announced, but from the initial reports, it appears they achieved a great deal here.  It will be interesting to see where this apparent pay raise places Frontier flight attendants with others in the industry.


For information concerning the initial stalemate in contract discussions:  http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/frontier-airlines-flight-attendants-protest.html

For additional information concerning the reported new contract:  https://www.marketwatch.com/story/frontier-airlines-flight-attendants-reach-tentative-contract-2019-03-20

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

NLRB: Discussion Among Employees About Tip Pooling is Protected Concerted Activity

  This Advice Memorandum from the National Labor Relations Board’s Associate General Counsel, Jayme Sophir, addressed whether employees which discussed and complained about tip pooling at work constituted protected concerted activity. In relevant part, an employer in New York operated a chain of steakhouses.  While tip pooling was in place at these steakhouses, some of the employees objected to it on the grounds that it was not transparent and improperly divided tips among the workers.  Employees were told not to complain or talk to each other about the tip pool and were told that doing so would endanger their jobs.  Despite the employer later attempting to provide some clarity as to how the tips were being divided, rancor still existed among some employees.  At one point, the employees were told by a general manager that some employees that had been talking about the tip pool were “cleared out” and the employer would continue to do so. In the Advice Memorandum, it was noted that emplo

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

A few years ago, I remember when the “Fight for $15” movement was taking off around the country.  Lo and behold, it appears that a $15/hour minimum wage is not the stopping point, which should be no surprise.  As the below article notes, New York is aggressively moving to ramp up hourly wage rates even higher.  While all the  below articles are worth a read, I called particular attention to that one. As always, below are a couple article that caught my eye this week. Disney World Workers Reject Latest Contract Offer Late last week, it was announced that workers at Disney World had rejected the most recent contract offer from the company, calling on their employer to do better.  As Brooks Barnes at The New York Times writes, the unions that represent about 32,000 workers at Disney World reported their members resoundingly rejected the 5 year contract offer which would have seen workers receive a 10% raise and retroactive increased back pay.  While Disney’s offer would have increased pa

Utah Non-Compete Bill Falters in House

Last month, a non-compete bill sponsored by Representative Brian Greene (Republican from Pleasant Grove) & up for vote in the Utah House failed to make it through the Legislature.  The bill sought to ban enforcement of non-competes if they came after a worker was already employed, given no compensation (such as a bonus or promotion) for signing the non-compete, and laid off within six months.  However, by a 22 - 49 vote, the bill was resoundingly defeated after some business groups lobbied to kill the non-compete bill.  One group in particular, The Free Enterprise Utah coalition, argued that the Utah State Legislature should hold off on any changes to non compete laws in the state until a survey about non competes was done among Utah businesses.  Representative Greene had countered this claim and argued that a survey was not needed to show that the current non compete laws in the states allowed many businesses, including some small high tech companies in the state, to per