A powerful flight attendant union that has been fighting a years-long campaign to represent tens of thousands of crew members at Delta Air Lines says it could just be a matter of weeks before it has collected enough authorization cards to file a request to form a union at the Atlanta-based carrier.
Delta is the only mainline US-based airline where a union does not represent flight attendants, despite several high-profile but failed attempts to convince aircrew at the carrier to unionize.
At present, only 20% of Delta’s entire US workforce is represented by a union, with pilots and despatchers the most notable employee groups currently being members of a union.
That’s a position that the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) is desperate to change with the hope that it can represent Delta’s 28,000-strong workgroup of inflight crewmembers.
The union must convince at least 50% of Delta flight attendants to sign an authorization card before it can even file a request to represent crewmembers, although national president Sara Nelson says her union is being hindered by Delta’s ‘union busting’ tactics.
Nelson, who is often described as the most powerful flight attendant in the United States given the fact that her union already represents more than 50,000 flight attendants at major carriers like United and Alaska Airlines, claims Delta has spent “tens of millions of dollars and hours of effort to keep workers from gaining the right to bargain.”
Some of Delta’s tactics were put under the spotlight in a recent lawsuit filed by a flight attendant who claimed the airline sided with an anti-union crewmember who was accused of sexually assaulting several colleagues.
The lawsuit claims new-hire flight attendants are subjected to mandatory training in which Delta made “false, misleading and coercive statements about AFA and otherwise spouted anti-union views,” while a large banner was also displayed in the training school which read: “Don’t risk it, Don’t sign it,” in reference to the authorization card.
In May, a group of 25 US senators wrote to Delta chief executive Ed Bastian, urging him to adopt a neutrality agreement in which the airline would not get involved in the current unionization campaign for both flight attendants and several other workgroups.
Despite the letter, Delta maintains an ‘anti-union’ website that lists the kinds of benefits that could be lost if employees vote to form a union. Delta insists that it “has not only the right but the responsibility to make sure our flight attendants have the facts.”
Delta’s ‘One Future’ website includes a ticker of how long AFA has been trying to negotiate updated contracts for its members at Alaska and United Airlines. In the case of Alaska, negotiations have been dragging on for more than two years, while United’s flight attendants will soon enter their third year of protracted bargaining.
AFA has tried and failed to win the right to represent Delta’s flight attendants on four separate occasions. The most recent failed attempt was in 2010, and the current campaign has been dragging on since 2019.
Delta flight attendants have previously rejected unionization attempts because they could lose out on one of the most generous profit-sharing schemes in the industry, as well as other benefits that critics claim were introduced just to stave off the risk of crewmembers signing authorization cards.
In 2022, for example, Delta became the first major US carrier to introduce boarding pay for flight attendants – a move that AFA claimed was a thinly veiled attempt to persuade Delta flight attendants to reject unionization.
If AFA’s calculations are correct, however, the union could be in a position to file for the right to represent Delta flight attendants early next year.
