Boarding Pay: Too Little, Too Late?

Late on Friday evening, the news broke that United Airlines had reached a groundbreaking, if tentative, labor agreement with the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), and delivering potential pay raises of up to 40%. According to the AFA-CWA, which represents United's 28,000 flight attendants, the deal offers “industry-leading” compensation and retroactive pay, a provision that United had previously resisted.

The new tentative deal is being framed as a major win for flight attendants at the Chicago-based carrier, but will it meet the expectations of union members who have spent the last four years watching the gap between their pay and the cost of living widen? 

AFA-CWA leadership say that the deal is only the product of their hard-earned negotiations, but the reality is that members are the real reason a new contract has been secured. These members have spent the last four years picketing and sharing feedback with their union leaders all the while watching their peers get multiple pay rises as they remain on the same wages as they got in 2021. Whatever is included in the deal, it had better be good to make the last four years of toil and sacrifice worth it. 

The full contract details remain under review, and the agreement now awaits internal union discussions scheduled for May 29–30, after which it will proceed to a full member vote. 

While the wage increases and retrospective pay are confirmed highlights in AFA-CWA’s memo announcing the deal, the issue of boarding pay remains conspicuously absent from formal communications. This is strange given that AFA-CWA has built their whole negotiation strategy around securing not only boarding pay but “ground duty” as well. This innovation would see  flight attendants compensated for all time spent on the ground, including delays and pre-flight briefings. 

On several occasions, when AFA-CWA leadership were asked to justify why negotiations were still dragging on after four years, they would refer to their decision to make ‘ground duty’ pay a red line. This push has been labelled as ambitious by union leaders but general consensus is that it was ill-advised as it ultimately led to prolonged talks and extra friction at the bargaining table. 

Only paid in the air. Is that fair?

Until 2022 not one of the major US airlines paid flight attendants for boarding and deplaning passengers. Instead, crew members would only earn their normal hourly rate from the moment the plane pushed back from the gate to when it arrived at its destination.

Working for free during one of the busiest and most stressful parts of a flight attendant’s day has been criticised for particularly disadvantaging junior flight attendants, who routinely work domestic routes with multiple legs or flights each day. As a result, these flight attendants spend significantly more time boarding and deplaning passengers than senior crew members working international trips, which typically involves only two periods of boarding and deplaning.

It was Delta Air Lines - the only major US airline without union representation for flight attendants - that first started paying flight attendants 50% of their hourly date during boarding. This means that for the past three years, Delta cabin crew have earned nearly $450 extra per month. Indeed, Delta flight attendants are set to receive an additional €58,500 in boarding pay compensation by 2032.

The compensation is proving so popular that some senior flight attendants are now opting for more domestic flights to take advantage of boarding pay. Delta’s bold step to modernise flight attendant pay is often attributed to a lack of union negotiations, allowing it to to sidestep prolonged discussions and unilaterally implement the change. 

The struggle continues 

When it comes to boarding pay, it’s not only United that’s dragging its feet. In 2023, Spirit Airlines finalised a new contract for its flight attendants that included wage increases of up to 27% but absolutely no mention of boarding pay. This April, American Airlines crew started to collect boarding pay for the first time after contract negotiations dragged on for more than three years. 

If boarding pay is included in the final United package, it will signal long-overdue progress. But a recently leaked memo from the AFA-CWA, advising members not to reject an upcoming contract, smacked of preemptive damage control and signalled to the industry that the final agreement may fall short of expectations. Failure to secure those terms would underscore a key argument made by critics of union-led negotiations: that unionisation, and the red tape that comes with it, will always delay progress, especially when expectations are set high and compromise is elusive. Delta’s move, made independently and years earlier, may be seen as the cleaner, more effective model.

At USTN, we believe boarding pay should not be a bargaining chip; it should be a given. That’s why we are launching a campaign to standardise boarding pay across the US airline industry. Regardless of airline or union affiliation, flight attendants deserve to be paid from the moment they begin working, not just when the plane takes off.

Until now, the lack of standardisation has created a great disparity in pay practices across the industry. As a flight attendant, your pay packet and your standard of living are shaped by negotiation politics rather than operational realities and for junior flight attendants, especially, this is one of the most inequitable aspects of the job.

Even if boarding pay is implemented from tomorrow, United flight attendants will never catch up with Delta flight attendants when it comes to total compensation. In bad news for unions, it will also mean that Delta’s compensation model will continue to stand apart, not just for what it offers, but for how it got there.