‘No Guts, No Glory’: United Airlines Flight Attendants Encouraged to Become Strike Leaders as Contract Negotiations Drag On

Flight attendants at United Airlines are being encouraged to sign up to a secret list of crew members who would be the first to go on strike should protracted contract negotiations with the Chicago-based carrier end in a stalemate.

In a new memo to tens of thousands of flight attendants at the airline, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) said it was now laying the groundwork for a highly disruptive walkout with the creation of its ‘Gearing Up to Strike’ or GUTS list.

GUTS is part of the union’s trademarked strike strategy, which it dubs CHAOS or ‘Cause Havoc Around Our System’ – a strategy that it has threatened during various contract negotiations since it was successfully used in 1993 during a strike by flight attendants at Alaska Airlines.

CHAOS doesn’t rely on an all-out strike because the union knows that any airline facing a potential walkout by flight attendants can quickly train office workers and managers to take on the roles of striking crewmembers for a short period of time.

During the 1993 Alaska Airlines strike, however, AFA managed to blindside the Seattle-based carrier by calling out flight attendants from seemingly random flights with little or no notice.

Alaska Airlines ended up in a situation in which it wasn’t able to deploy retrained office workers to disrupted flights fast enough, resulting in lengthy delays and cancellations.

The controversial strike strategy proved very successful, but it faced a legal challenge by airline bosses who attempted to secure a court injunction against CHAOS. In a significant win for the union, however, a federal judge ruled that CHAOS was, in fact, legal and in the end Alaska Airlines was forced to reach a negotiated settlement.

The latest memo from the United Airlines branch of the union says it is now looking for “committed” flight attendants who would be the first to be called upon to take part in a CHAOS action.

“These volunteers will be leaders of this effort, either striking the first targeted flights or acting as leaders when more and more flights are struck,” the memo explained. “We have said we might strike the whole system for half an hour, or a day, or a week.”

The CHAOS strategy not only keeps the airline on the back foot, but it’s also a lot more palatable for flight attendants who are primarily paid only for the hours they work on flights.

Given that CHAOS isn’t necessarily an all-out strike, flight attendants will continue earning a wage on flights that aren’t targeted.

That’s not to say, though, that flight attendant can just rely on GUTS volunteers to strike for them while they continue to work. “CHAOS is still a strike, so if we strike, every flight attendant on that flight is expected to honor the strike just as if it were a traditional picket line,” the memo explains.

“We will use the GUTS list fo strategic and tactical targeting of flights, but no one s exempt once the strikes begin.”

With the assistance of federal mediators, union representatives met with the airline at the end of October in the latest round of negotiations. During these bargaining sessions, United was unwilling to make any “significant movement” in its economic proposal and is currently only willing to match base pay rates that were recently ratified by flight attendants at rival American Airlines.

United Airlines has so far refused to offer a ratification bonus or retroactive pay, while demands for ground duty pay have also been ignored.

Last month, it was revealed that the union was demanding an inflation-busting 28% pay raise in the first year of the contract, followed by 4% every year thereafter as part of an open-ended agreement.

The union is also demanding a ratification bonus, retroactive pay, and ground duty pay, which would see flight attendants paid half their flight duty pay for any time spent on the ground – such as boarding, deplaning, and moving from one plane to the next.

Any strike would first need to be approved by the National Mediation Board, which would have to declare an impasse and then release the two sides into a 28-day cooling-off period.

The NMB proved incredibly reluctant to declare an impasse during the American Airlines flight attendant contract talks, despite the union twice asking the independent agency to release the two sides into a cooling-off period.