Give Us 8 Hours Notice You’re Sick Or We’ll Give You a Performance Warning, United Airlines Tells Flight Attendants

Flight attendants at United Airlines have lost a legal bid to stop the carrier from slapping them with a potentially career-ending performance warning if they don’t provide at least eight hours’ notice that they are sick.

Like many US airlines, United manages flight attendants who take sick leave by issuing so-called ‘attendance points.’ If a flight attendant collects too many points in a 12-month period, then they face disciplinary, including possible termination.

In addition to the long-running attendance point program, however, in 2022, United started to issue counseling and performance warnings to flight attendants who provided less than eight hours’ notice of their scheduled flight departure that they were sick.

A performance warning could lead to harsher disciplinary action even if flight attendants don’t ‘trigger’ punishment under the attendance point scheme.

The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), which represents crew members at United, challenged the aggressive ‘double dip’ management of sick flight attendants, but two years later, the union has been told that United is acting within its rights.

An independent arbitrator “was untroubled by the fact that United management had been issuing counselings and performance warnings in addition to points” for short notice sick calls, the union recently told its members.

The reason behind the decision was that United already has the right to hit flight attendants with both attendance and performance discipline for the same event. For example, a flight attendant suspected of abusing sick leave could be issued attendance points and also terminated at the same time.

United can still waive a performance warning for an emergency sick call with less than eight hours notice, but flight attendants have been warned that the company could question whether the alleged emergency was really as dire as they claim.

Of course, one of the main reasons for requiring flight attendants to give so much notice that they are sick is to ensure the ‘integrity’ of United’s flight schedule, ensuring that flights don’t have to be delayed or canceled as the airline scrambles to find a replacement crew member.

Last year, United faced regulatory scrutiny for a new sickness policy that required flight attendants to provide evidence from a healthcare provider that they were too ill to work if they called in sick on the weekend.

The union slammed the policy, describing it as ‘reprehensible’ and demanded that United’s head of inflight services, John Slater, resign over violating the flight attendant contract.

The Department of Labor was forced to step into the debacle, and the Wage and Hour Administrator confirmed that the agency was working with United to ensure that the policy didn’t breach the provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

United said it had been forced to implement the controversial policy after seeing an unacceptable spike in weekend sick calls. The policy was rescinded several months after being implemented after the weekend sick call rate dropped to acceptable levels.