The rate at which American Airlines is moving to terminate flight attendants for a variety of disciplinary issues has allegedly tripled in the last year and the union that represents crew at the Dallas Fort Worth-based airline says it is “inundated” with requests to help flight attendants facing the sack.
The alarming rise in flight attendant terminations was revealed during a recent executive committee meeting of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA).
The union’s regional representatives, who are dotted across the United States, are each handling at least ten flight attendants facing termination for a slew of transgressions.
Despite well-publicized staff shortages across the aviation industry, American Airlines has made no secret of the fact that managers are looking to strictly enforce a wide range of rules and policies that may have previously been allowed to slip.
The flight attendant union, however, is concerned that some of its members are being moved to termination without meetings or “attempts to mitigate”. The union is also concerned that flight attendant managers are now expected to supervise as many as 1,000 crew members each.
American Airlines was asked to provide further information on its disciplinary procedures but the airline did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The union and AA have previously locked horns over a controversial sickness policy where flight attendants rack up points for going sick. Acquiring too many points results in disciplinary action and possible termination.
Introduced in 2018, APFA filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a year later alleging the sickness policy amounted to gender discrimination because the vast majority of flight attendants are female.
The union highlighted differing sickness policies for pilots, who are predominantly men, and the female-majority flight attendant workforce.
An independent arbitration board ruled that the point-based system could remain in force but ordered AA to make significant changes to the policy because certain elements were “running afoul” of the flight attendant collective bargaining agreement.
This partly falls on AA for giving new hires travel passes as soon as they start. Therefore, new hires start commuting immediately and have no intention of ever living at base. New hires are expected to be available to the company within 2-3 hours. Many of these new hires on reserve sit at home and wait till assignment is given and then try to commute to work. Another part of the problem is the “entitled” generation and not wanting to do their time and play by the rules.
Why should they live in base? Airlines have to do commuting for employees because there simply aren’t enough people who apply for the job in the cities they are based at. Look at places like NYC. It’s a hellhole. Who would want to move there? Airlines have high attrition rates and the only way to get stewardesses is to deal with commuting.
Gender discrimination?…. but I thought men can have a uterus now too….
AA really NEEDS to clean things up….a lot. Their crews a good place to start. They’re starting to resemble NK inflight crews where there are no appearance, grooming or conduct standards. Next do customer service please.
You are so right. Supposedly AA is allowing a male flight attendant to wear the female dress. The crews are a mess and it was never like this before Parker and his wrecking ball moved to Dallas. Regional mentality is not working for a global airline.
I come from an airline family and I couldnt agree more. Once the airlines relaxed standards of weight, hair, jewelry, uniform and even allowing pregnant FA’s the landslide began. Once you relax standards it is hard to reinstate them, that goes for pax as well. Have a union for standards not for coddling. If a company is privately owned I dont see where the govt can come in to tell them how to run their business.
This shows that flight attendants have many unprofessional and unruly members in its ranks. On the other hand, you don’t see hospitals on a rampage expelling surgeons, who adhere to a strict code of ethics and conduct.
What’s puzzling to me about nurses is why are so many obese? It’s a complete contradiction to what they’re suppose to represent.
What about the doctors that pushed unapproved vaccines to innocent patients using fear instead of informed consent? And you can’t claim they did provide informed consent because it was impossible. Pfizer asked the FDA to withhold trial data that you are entitled to for another 75 years. The only reason we know now how bad they are is because a lawsuit prevented the FDA from hiding the trial data. So doctors pushed a product, becoming a de facto marketing agency for big-pharma. Strict code of ethics? What happened to “do no harm”? And you can’t say that unprecedented levels of harm wasn’t done because the government VAERS number shows over 30,000 deaths, and that’s only at 1% reporting. The military’s DMED data was far, far worse.
Caring for people along life’s journey…. WORD SALAD. All AA cares about is on time departures and profitability. They certainly don’t care about customers or employees.
Based solely on how they treat their customers we can assume they treat their employees like sh*t too. Surely AA can’t expect the public to take their side on this. As for the “personal grooming” comments, gotta wonder if this is discrimination based on hair. And we know what that is.
Yah, the word “journey” is pretty played out by the media. The slogan is lame and embarassing.