“Our negotiators suck”: What went wrong with the United deal

Last month, United Airlines flight attendants overwhelmingly rejected a tentative contract agreement that would have delivered immediate pay raises of at least 26% and other purported benefits. The decisive result surprised commentators and industry alike, with many assuming that United flight attendants would have ratified the deal after five years of negotiations. The dust has now settled on the result with everyone simply wanting to know, what went wrong? USTN has been asking United flight attendants directly to find out.

On July 29, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) confirmed that after five years of protracted negotiations, 71% of members had voted against the deal with 92% participating in the vote. A pre-vote poll conducted by USTN accurately predicted the outcome, showing 74% of United flight attendants opposing the deal, remarkably close to the actual 71% rejection rate.

Ahead of the deal, traditional media and aviation vloggers reported on the tentative agreement, highlighting grievances from members about where the deal fell short. The most common criticism was that while the deal offered an average pay increase of 26.9%, flight attendants have suffered a 24% loss in real-term earnings due to inflation during the five years since the last agreement lapsed. Beyond this, the media reported on the AFA backing down from “ground pay” despite previous promises made, and confusion around the layover policy which called for flight attendants to be “reasonably available.”

In the weeks prior to the vote, AFA-CWA scrambled to counter the surrounding negative media coverage. AFA President Sara Nelson publicly blamed the rise of inaccurate reporting on the use of AI and misinformed bloggers. She stated in an interview with Forbes: “What’s been very disheartening in this ratification has been the onset of A.I. and Chat GPT and the explosion of blogs that just report things that A.I. is incorrectly reporting and do not check with the union for accuracy.” President of the United AFA chapter Ken Diaz reaffirmed the point, stressing that “there is so much misinformation from bloggers, but once we have the conversation and clarify, people understand it is not factual.”

With the AFA waging war on the media, it was unclear what caused the overwhelming rejection of the tentative agreement. Did flight attendants reject the deal because of misinformation or poor AFA communication? Was it the result of disappointing pay rises or simply a feeling that United flight attendants could do better in light of United's recent strong earnings reports? Post the results, USTN conducted a qualitative poll exclusively aimed at United flight attendants to understand what went wrong and why. The results were illuminating; many of the responses echoed the very same sentiment that Nelson had previously attributed to misinformation and AI.

Beyond the terms of the contract itself, there was a clear consensus among many of the flight attendants about the integrity of the negotiating process itself. Several respondents said they did not believe that the union was “acting fully in [their] best interests”, with one identifying the leadership and negotiators as “either incompetent or compromised.” One aptly said, “They failed to actually care what the members were saying. They did a survey to ask us what we wanted almost three years ago. That’s all.”

Other respondents were blunter in their assessment of the negotiations, writing: “AFA sucks. They didn't listen to anything we asked for and then to add insult to injury, they tried to force this crap TA down our throats,” while another wrote, “AFA has no balls and our negotiators suck.”

The United deal is particularly disappointing in this regard; after urging members to hold out for five years, the union showed little urgency once the contract expired during the pandemic and even lent its chief negotiator to rival union APFA, hoping American would set a precedent that United could simply copy. Instead, American’s deal delivered only a 20.5% raise, well below the 33% goal. Perhaps the AFA should have spent more time reassuring its members than sparring with the media, who were trying to report on the genuine criticism surrounding the deal.

At the core of the discontent surrounding the contract was that proposed pay increase failed to keep pace with five years of inflation. Under the proposed agreement, the rate for new hires would rise from an hourly rate of $28.88 to $36.92, while the most senior attendants could have earned up to $84.78. United had also allocated $551 million from its Q2 budget to fund a one-time “retro bonus” averaging $21,500 per flight attendant.  However, many members viewed these provisions as insufficient. One flight attendant stated, in an answer to USTN’s survey, that it “did not even equal the cost of living increases we have incurred in the past five years.”  

Another key issue was the absence of ground pay in the proposed contract, compensation for the long, unpaid hours flight attendants spend waiting between their flights. The AFA had previously pledged to implement the concept of ‘ground pay’, even encouraging members to picket with signs and explaining that this was one of the core reasons why negotiations were dragging on. However, the concept of ground pay, otherwise described by a flight attendant as “long, unpaid airport sits between flights”, was “noticeably missing” from the final contract with AFA, deciding that it was worth forfeiting the measure for other elements of the deal. The recent USTN poll revealed that this may have been a mistake, with around a fifth mentioning ground pay as one of the core reasons why they could not support the tentative agreement.

Following the resounding rejection of the proposed deal, negotiations are not expected to resume until December 9, 2025, with a four-day session scheduled by the federal mediator. Further sessions are expected to take place in January, February, and March 2026.

AFA are trying to put their best foot forward after this recent defeat. However, it’s hard to ignore that five years of fruitless pay negotiations have eroded trust in the AFA. They are fast losing their mandate, with several respondents calling for a change in leadership and arguing that “Ken Diaz needs to go.” Given that a third of flight attendants no longer trust the AFA to deliver an “industry-leading deal,” questions remain over whether the union can bounce back from this defeat and secure an agreement that truly benefits United flight attendants once and for all.