More than five months after flight attendants at Alaska Airlines rejected a proposed new pay deal, the union that represents crew members at the Seattle-based carrier is finally set to present a new tentative agreement to its members.
The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) has now been trying to secure an updated contract for crew members at Alaska Airlines for over two years, but by the end of this week, we will learn whether the union’s master executive council will approve the latest offer and put it forward to members to vote on.
It’s been a long process to get to this point, and in July 2024, the union thought it had cracked it when it tabled a tentative agreement that had promised an average pay raise of 32%, along with boarding pay and retroactive pay for the many months that the current contract has been amendable.
Flight attendants, however, quickly voted down the offer, with more than two-thirds of crew members rejecting the deal.
Following the ballot result, the union urgently sought feedback from flight attendants to find out exactly what the sticking points were before convincing airline managers to return to the bargaining table to hammer out an amended agreement.
Details of the new deal are yet to be released, and the master executive council must still approve of what the union’s negotiating committee has been able to secure before more information is passed onto flight attendants.
A vote is expected to take place this Friday (January 24), and if approved, the contract will be shared with flight attendants on the same day.
As part of the merger with Hawaiian Airlines, the union has already secured commitments from the Alaska Airlines Group over how a combined contract between flight attendants at Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines will look when they eventually form a single workgroup.
The process of negotiating a joint agreement will, however, still likely be fraught with difficulty and could take even longer than the current negotiations have taken.
Crew members at Alaska Airlines are one of the final flight attendant workgroups to hammer out an updated contract, following successful but strung-out negotiations at Southwest and American Airlines.
Flight attendants at United Airlines are, however, still very much engaged in active negotiations, although both sides remain deeply at odds on several important aspects of the contract, including, of course, pay.
