Flight Attendants Get Deal At Air Canada And Talk At American Partner

Flight attendants at Air Canada reached a tentative agreement early Tuesday morning, but flight attendants at a key American Airlines regional partner are still battling for some of the same contract improvements.

Flight attendants at PSA Airlines, one of three wholly-owned regional carriers for American Airlines, demonstrated Monday in five cities including Charlote, where the airline is based. The Association of Flight Attendants represents the airline’s 1,600 flight attendants.

The union’s demands are very similar to what the Air Canada flight attendants sought: boarding pay, wage gains and some work rule improvements.

Boarding pay, for time spent on the aircraft before departure, has become an industry standard over the last few years. It is in the American Airlines contract with the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, the Alaska Airline contract with the AFA and the tentative contract with AFA which United Airlines flight attendants recently rejected. Delta and SkyWest also offer boarding pay to their non-union flight attendants. The rate in all five cases is 50%. The figure was also on the table in the Air Canada talks, although details of the tentative agreement have not been released.

However, at PSA, “Boarding pay is on the table at 25% of our pay rates,” said Sean Griffin, the Charlotte-based 20-year PSA flight attendant who is vice president of the master executive council and a negotiator. Also, he said, “the company is still only willing to offer low single digit wage increases.”

Other groups have received double digit increases. The first three-year wages at PSA, where about 70% of flight attendants have three years or less, are $27.06 hourly or about $24,000 a year. “It’s frustrating for junior flight attendants,” Griffin said. Flight attendants top out at $43.51 hourly after 18 years. Regional flight attendants typically earn less than mainline flight attendants.

Griffin was part of the Charlotte demonstration: about three dozen flight attendants participated. Length was limited to about an hour due to 90-degree heat and high humidity. The PSA contract, approved in 2019, became amendable on July 15, 2023,

A positive indicator for negotiations is that veteran management negotiator Jerry Glass will be at the table when mediated talks resume Wednesday in Washington, D.C. “That’s a good sign,” Griffin said. “He wants to get a deal done.” Glass first participated in remote talks in June, he said.

PSA spokesman Joe Horvath said Monday, “Today’s demonstration is one of the important ways flight attendants express their desire to get a deal done — and we share the same goal. With the support of the National Mediation Board, we continue to meet regularly with the AFA and have made progress toward reaching an agreement that our flight attendants deserve.

“We look forward to continued discussions this week,” Horvath said.

American’s three wholly owned regional partners are Envoy, Piedmont and PSA. In general, “We set the foundation for all of them,” Griffin said. “We want to make sure it is a sturdy foundation.” In fact, the PSA talks have high importance for all regional airline flight attendant contracts.

Last week, the approximately 150 flight attendants at GoJet, who are AFA members, ratified a contract that includes wage increases and a trigger for boarding pay. “They will get boarding pay like the rest of the industry, with the trigger of another regional airline getting it,” said AFA President Sara Nelson in an interview on Monday. “This also helps at the table with PSA, which knows that when PSA does it, they won’t be alone.”
At the protest, Charlotte base president Dana Sweat noted the death of Charlotte-based PSA Flight attendants Danasia Elder and Ian Epstein in the crash of American Airlines Flight 5342 in January.

“We all kind of woke up that night and it hit us that this can be a dangerous job,” Sweat said. “Not everybody takes five, six, seven flights a day.

“Every time we get on that plane, we are firefighters, medics, psychotherapists, and law enforcers,” she said. “We are not compensated for that.”