Some flight attendants at Delta Air Lines fear the Atlanta-based carrier is hiring crew for the second time in just four months in a desperate bid to stave off the threat of them forming a union as a final push by the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) gets underway.
Under the rules of the Railway Labor Act (which also governs labor relations in the airline industry), to form a union, at least 50% of Delta’s flight attendant workforce must sign a union authorization card, which would then trigger a formal ballot.
AFA-CWA has tried and failed to unionize Delta’s flight attendants on four separate occasions, but the union believes it hasn’t been this close to gathering the required number of authorization cards since 2010, when the last campaign ended in disappointment for union leader Sara Nelson.
Nelson and her union started their fifth attempt to unionize Delta crewmembers in 2019, and AFA now believes it could be just weeks away from gathering the required number of authorization cards.
The threat appears to be taken very seriously by Delta’s leadership who, last week, sent what AFA described as a “union busting” email to tens of thousands of fight attendants. The airline said in its email that it was simply sharing facts with its employees.
Just four months after running an extensive flight attendant recruitment campaign in September, Delta has unusually reopened its hiring window, with lucky candidates expected to start training in early 2025.
Union-supporting flight attendants fear that the effect of this latest hiring campaign will increase the total number of crewmembers and will mean that even more authorization cards will need to be collected before a ballot can be called.
For its part, Delta says that it is simply hiring more flight attendants to match what it describes as its “most robust travel schedule ever” in 2025.
During training, the new recruits are set to receive mandatory training in which the airline makes “false, misleading and coercive statements about AFA,” according to a recent lawsuit filed by an ex-flight attendant.
Delta’s last recruitment campaign in September attracted an overwhelming response, with the airline’s dedicated recruitment website repeatedly crashing as desperate hopefuls rushed to submit their applications.
You might have thought, therefore, that Delta would have plenty of talent to pick from and wouldn’t need to reopen applications soon, although the airline did send an email to candidates reminding them that they were expected to wear underwear to their interview.
Despite the recent push by AFA, the issue of unionization amongst Delta flight attendants remains highly contentious, and many believe they could lose out on one of the most generous profit-sharing schemes in the industry if they were to be unionized.
At present, only 20% of Delta’s US workforce is unionized – most notably, the airline’s pilots and despatchers.
Sure. That’s what Delta is doing. It’s hiring flight attendants, even though there’s no work for them, just to somehow stave off a union.
This is the kind of nonsense union radicals spew that make the 94% of private sector workers who aren’t unionized scorn them.