Bunch of lazy freeloaders wanting to get paid for working.
This sounds insane, it would be like if every cashier had to greet customers at the door for free several hours each day.
Or they only got paid for the seconds/minutes they were actively checking out a customer. This is insane
Canadians just won their negotiations, so not surprising here. Canadians won by outplaying the Canadian carrier though, so not the same strategy.
wtf?
“We can fly upwards of 15 hours in a day and only get paid for three and a half. Our flight attendants don’t make a living wage,” said Becky Black, a flight attendant for nearly 22 years at PSA Airlines, which operates flights for American Airlines. “We have a flight attendant who lives in a homeless shelter. We have flight attendants that are living in crew rooms. We have flight attendants who are 30 years old and have to move back in with their parents because they can’t afford to live with this job.
Probably an ignorant question but if you go to work 15 hours just to go back to the homeless shelter. Why not just skip the middle man, and just not go to work?
Maybe they live in a state that requires working for medicaid?
https://www.newsweek.com/states-medicaid-work-requirements-map-2023330
capitalism. the problem is fucking capitalism.
🌏🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀 always fucking has been.
That’s wrong. You can be on duty 15 hours a day and only get paid 3.5 hours. She misspoke or the press got it wrong.
Unfortunately this is true (assuming the PSA block minimum is 3.5hrs) At jetblue it’s 5 hrs, at spirit it’s 4 hrs. Duty can be scheduled between 12-14 hours and extended upwards of 15 for delays.

Take the example of this fun little overnight trip, you fly one leg to Norfolk, sit on the ground for five hours (six and a half, but half hour deplaning, one hour boarding) then fly back. Your flight time (paid time) is 4hrs33 and your time away from base (time on duty) is 12hrs35
But dont panic folks, you can be disciplined at any point during duty time for your behavior, where you are, and uniform compliance :,(
(Edit: blurred some stuff in the pic)
No idea if PSA even has a day value in their FA contract.
I say the same thing, where “flying” is transit time between places, even if there’s a layover. There’s a difference being at home and “on duty” as in on-call and ready to go and being stuck in an airport for 10 hours because you’re doing a Chicago-LA-Chicago return and stuck in LA because the shitter’s broke on the plane you took there and need to get back to O’Hare.
Seriously, that person is not at home and not able to really have control over their own time because of their job. It’s more than being just “on duty” in a sense that they shouldn’t be getting paid.
Easy, not on the clock, I’m not working.
Edit: no I didn’t read the article.
So the converse of that would be: on the clock, I’m working.
And since they’re on the clock before and after the plane is in the air, they should be getting paid for that time. It’s a fucking travesty that they haven’t been until now.
What kind of people stay in a job like that? I would have to be pretty desperate and know that I was otherwise unemployable to keep showing up for a job that only paid me for a fraction of the time I was required to be there.
Because it’s still a “glamor” job, and it eventually pays OK after a decade + of work. Travel, travel benefits, don’t take your work home with you…if you’re good with people and can do the training it can be a good gig. It should pay better, but nobody gets paid until the door is closed and the plane pushes back. Not even the pilots, but pilot pay can be high enough to account for all the time at work outside the “door closed at departure and door open at destination” pay clock where the flight attendants are stuck dealing with passengers on a plane even if the door is closed sitting at the gate and they don’t get paid.
Do you mean like work at Starbucks or Home Depot?
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/home-deport-responding-call-31-day-boycott-over-dei
https://www.newsweek.com/american-businesses-supporting-donating-donald-trump-list-2027957
The Home Depot was embroiled in whistleblower litigation brought under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) law. In July 2005, former employee Michael Davis, represented by attorney Mark D. Schwartz, filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the Home Depot, alleging that his discharge was in retaliation for refusing to make unwarranted back charges against vendors. Davis alleges that the Home Depot forced its employees to meet a set quota of back charges to cover damaged or defective merchandise, forcing employees to make chargebacks to vendors for merchandise that was undamaged and not defective. The Home Depot alleges that it fired Davis for repeatedly failing to show up for work.
Wait… They don’t get paid for work when not flying? Wtf
Well, they’re flight attendants, not rolling attendants, or sitting at the parking spot attendants. It’s all in the job description.
Uneducated take
Sounds sarcastic to me
Sounds like commie talk.
/S
If you have to be somewhere sometime for your job you should be getting paid, we need better unions
Yup. You should be paid from the moment you’re required to arrive until the moment you’re allowed to leave. That includes
- Getting changed into uniform, if there’s a reason the uniform couldn’t have been worn in (e.g. special safety gear, full body character costumes)
- Any security or bag checks
- Turning on computers
My boss at my first job tried to tell me that i needed to be in and logged into my terminal by my shift start time
These terminals were like 15 years old, booted over the network and took at least 5 minutes to log in if they weren’t turned off the night before. 8-10 mins if i had to turn it on as well.
I told him to do one.
Also if i was 1 min late for work they would dock 15 mins of pay and still expected me to work the remaining 14 mins unpaid, on minimum wage.
My fiances POW (a care home) does this too to this day
Carers should unionise, it’s a highly exploitative sector
Carers should unionise, it’s a highly exploitative sector
Many care workers (in the US, at least) are unionized, through SEIU. Perhaps your fiance could reach out to them for help organizing their workplace.
The commute. Make employers pay an extra 2 hours a day and they’ll be a lot more willing to let us work from home.
Of course, not all jobs can be done remotely, but this would free up traffic and improve the commute of those that have to work in-person.
If I have to spend time doing ANYTHING (including nothing) for your company against my free will. You will pay me.
Canada did it first!
I have Europe might have done it before us. 😄
Looks like the US flight attendants are following Canada’s lead. Good on them.
Air Canada (AC.TO), flight attendants want to make gains on unpaid work that go beyond recent advances secured by their U.S. counterparts, a union leader said on Wednesday, in a fresh test of the way airlines compensate cabin crews.
…
New labor agreements at American Airlines (AAL.O), and Alaska Airlines (ALK.N), legally require carriers to start the clock for paying flight attendants when passengers are boarding, not when the flight starts to taxi down the runway. Those gains came after Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), whose flight attendants are not in a union, instituted boarding pay for its cabin crew at half of their hourly wages in 2022 when they were trying to organize.
I did not know this. It’s a wonder anyone chooses to be a flight attendant at all. I know I would quit as soon as I found out they weren’t going to pay me for the work I did.
Capitalism is such an incredibly failed experiment, and now those who privatized all the gains from it will hardly allow public discourse claiming as much.
I’ve known about the fact they only get paid in the air for years. Nobody believed me. They also don’t believe me when I say flight attendants are the dumbest, rudest, most narcisistic assholes I’ve ever met.
I work at the airport, and very rarely do I ever meet one that’s even tolerable to be around. I’ve seen them trip little kids because they don’t care where they’re walking. In their eyes, the entire planet is their right of way. I’ve seen them cut in line at chic fil a in front of the whole line, with the logic being “Oh, I’ll only be a minute”. I’ve seen then stand in a group clump, making a wheelchair go AROUND them, because they were too self importsnt to clear a path for a guy in a wheelchair.
The best way to describe this situation in my eyes, is that they’re a group in a sympathetic situation who deserve no sympathy.
Flight Attendant here 🤚 I haven’t seen the behavior you describe (except cutting in line, I have seen that and it always made me uncomfortable, but most now just use the pre-order app). I have seen some level of asshole behavior from FAs, gate agents, rampers, pilots, cleaners. Oddly not maintenence or movers, but maybe I just dont get the time with them.
I’ve been in my role with my company over a decade, and noticed a pretty big culture shift during that time. When I started the gate agents and FAs would butt heads a lot; one work group was focused on everything they needed for a smooth flight and union protected so didn’t mind advocating for themselves, the other group got reprimanded ending in loss of the job if the flight (or too many flights) went out late. Leadership introduced joint training between multiple workgroups and explained pressures of each role to other groups. It really improved teamwork. Now security/cleaners/pilots/FAs/gate agents are actually communicating, even if just to greet each other. It was toxic before.
I pretty much despise our corporate management but gave them the grace to call them leadership here because it is one good thing they’ve done, and it made a lasting impact.
All I’m saying is, if I was required to spend hours at work without pay, I would be an absolute prick at work as well.
Outside of work, too! Just an absolute miserable piece of shit 24/7.
It’s sad because I was totally on board with all of the points the comment above you was making and then you said what you said…
fuck the system!
I’d be a dick at work too
Wow. I work in aviation and have never witnessed the universal poor behavior you describe, nor the deliberate assault on people in the terminal. Flight attendants are people too and can have crappy days, but you’re painting with a really broad brush.
Only a select few would agree to work a job mostly for free. Apparently that select few are the desperate assholes you’ve described.
If the job/pay attracted people that had even an ounce of self worth, I don’t think you’d see this trend.


















