After more than five years of negotiations, persistent threats of a crippling strike, and high-level intervention from the Biden administration, a tentative contract agreement has finally been reached between American Airlines and its 28,000 strong workforce of flight attendants.
The deal was reached on Friday following a week of secretive make or break talks held in Phoenix between the airline and the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) which represents crew members.
Overseeing the talks was the National Mediation Board (NMB), an independent federal agency that manages labor relations in the railway and aviation industries. It was the NMB that managed to broker the deal after American Airlines came back to the bargaining table with a number of concessions.
The details of the tentative agreement remain under wraps, but the flight attendant union says American Airlines has added billions of dollars to its original proposals and has included retro pay and contractual improvements – something that the airline had been refusing to concede until very recently.
In recent months, the flight attendant union had been piling pressure on the NMB to declare an impasse and release the two sides to a 30-day cooling-off period, which precedes a strike unless American Airlines returned to the bargaining table with a much-improved offer.
Flight attendants had backed a potential strike by 99.47%, although the NMB had been reluctant to declare an impasse and kept pushing the two sides to meet for further negotiations.
In recent weeks, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had even met with both sides during a bargaining session in Washington DC in the hope of breaking the deadlock.
APFA’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee will meet next Wednesday to discuss the tentative agreement and decide whether it should be put forward to the union’s members.
If the union does approve the agreement then further details are expected to be released shortly thereafter.
“We want to thank all of the Flight Attendants who came together to speak with one voice as we fought for respect for our profession and for the work that we perform,” the union said in a memo on Friday.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for American Airlines told us: “We are pleased to have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract with the Association of Professional Flight Attendants.”
“It’s a contract that will provide immediate financial and quality-of-life improvements for American’s flight attendants. It’s a contract we’re proud of and one our flight attendants have earned.”
