Why Unions Can't Agree on Robert Isom

The CEO that 28,000 flight attendants want fired just got a public endorsement from the most powerful flight attendant in the world. Here's what's really going on.

Less than two weeks after American Airlines' mainline flight attendant union issued the first vote of no confidence against a CEO in its nearly 50-year history, something remarkable happened: Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) and widely regarded as the most influential labor leader in U.S. aviation stepped up to publicly praise that very same CEO.

Robert Isom, she said, had been personally instrumental in securing a landmark contract for regional flight attendants at PSA Airlines, a wholly owned subsidiary of American. The deal delivers pay increases of up to 50%, boarding pay for the first time, and a shorter three-year term designed to get workers back to the table sooner. Nelson called it a model that "stands in stark contrast to other carriers who are succeeding on the backs of their underpaid workers."

It laid bare the fault lines now running through American Airlines' workforce at the worst possible time.

Two unions, two realities

The divide isn't ideological. It's structural.

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), which represents American's 28,000 mainline cabin crew, issued its unanimous no-confidence vote on February 9. The charges were sweeping: an 87% collapse in net income (from roughly $900 million down to $111 million in 2025), a botched corporate sales strategy that alienated business travelers and sent the airline plummeting to last place in the Wall Street Journal's annual rankings, and a chaotic winter storm response that left flight attendants sleeping on airport floors, to which Isom reportedly replied that such disruptions were simply "part of the job."

APFA President Julie Hedrick didn't hold back. "This level of failure begins at the very top," she said. The Allied Pilots Association, representing 16,000 captains and first officers, piled on days earlier with a letter to the board warning that American "has failed to define an identity or a strategy to correct course."

Meanwhile, at PSA Airlines, where crew members fly CRJ-700s and CRJ-900s out of Charlotte, Dayton, Dallas, and Philadelphia, the mood was celebratory. Nelson's AFA, not APFA, represents those regional flight attendants, and the tentative deal they secured was being hailed as the best regional contract in recent memory. From where PSA crews are sitting, Isom isn't the problem, he's the guy who picked up the phone and made the deal happen.

The Nelson question

Industry watchers are asking a pointed question: was Nelson's praise really about Isom, or was it aimed at someone else entirely?

Nelson is still technically a United Airlines flight attendant, and her union has been locked in a protracted and increasingly bitter contract fight with United CEO Scott Kirby, a former American Airlines executive who worked alongside Isom for years. The AFA-CWA negotiated a deal for United's flight attendants that the union itself called the best in its history. The membership rejected it. Negotiations are now back at square one, and United crews remain stuck on 2019-era wages.

Against that backdrop, praising Isom for delivering a generous deal in weeks looks less like an organic endorsement and more like a calculated message to Kirby: ‘this is what leadership looks like when management actually wants to get something done’.

The bigger picture

What's striking is how neatly the Isom divide maps onto the two-tier reality of American aviation. Mainline crews, the ones flying wide-bodies to London and 737s coast-to-coast, are watching Delta earn $5 billion and United pull in $3.4 billion on similar revenue. Even though American only scraped together $111 million, their CEO compensation kept climbing.

Regional crews operate in a different universe. Pay has historically been so low at carriers like PSA that a 50% raise, while transformative for the workers receiving it, still brings compensation closer to liveable rather than competitive with mainline peers. For these flight attendants, any CEO willing to accelerate negotiations and agree to a shorter contract cycle is a marked improvement over the status quo.

The board, for its part, appears to be standing behind Isom. When the pilots' union requested a direct meeting, the board redirected them back to the CEO, a classic governance manoeuvre that signals continued backing while avoiding the appearance of undermining a sitting chief executive. Isom himself has pointed to a projected jump in adjusted earnings per share for 2026, a new Citi credit card partnership, and lounge and premium product investments as evidence that the turnaround is underway.

Whether the workforce buys it is another matter. The no-confidence vote was a first. The picket line outside American's Fort Worth headquarters on February 12 was another escalation. And the pilots haven't ruled out their own formal vote.

For now, Robert Isom occupies a peculiar position in American corporate life: simultaneously the best boss in the building and the worst, depending on which union you are a part of.