The connection between flight delays and cabin crews’ pay

Between late May and August this year, about 25% of flights were delayed, up from 18.6% in the summer of 2019. Some of that increase can be blamed on the widespread cancellations during July’s CrowdStrike outage, but according to flight attendant unions, the issues go deeper than that.

Whizy Kim, a senior reporter for Vox, has covered the connection between delays and crew contracts. She joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about how the delays might have more to do with flight attendants’ unique pay structure than we might think. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Kai Ryssdal: Most of us, when we go to work, we show up, we clock in and we start getting paid. Flight attendants, not so much. What’s going on?

Whizy Kim: Yeah. So being a flight attendant is, I imagine, pretty hard. The flight is actually just a fraction of their days, and they can spend a lot of time on the ground. So they are supposed to get paid for their whole duty period, but when you’re on the ground, it’s a lot less, and, in some cases, not any money compared to the hourly rate that you’d get when you’re in the air.

Ryssdal: Just sort of baseline, how much do flight attendants make? What’s the range?

Kim: It really, really varies. But there was a kind of viral proof-of-income letter for an American Airlines flight attendant floating around earlier this year, and they estimated they would make about $27,000 a year. So it’s not a lot, especially if you’re starting out.

Ryssdal: OK. So connect both the way the pay structure is, which is, you know, full pay, in essence, when you’re actually flying, and less pay, and in some instances, much less pay when you’re still on the ground and low pay overall for beginning flight attendants. Connect that to flight delays.

Kim: OK, so just on the face of it, a delay means that they’re waiting longer to start getting paid. But beyond that fact, just on a passenger level, the way we might get impacted by this is flight attendants have a max amount of time that they can legally work. It’s usually around 14 consecutive hours, and then they’re required to get nine consecutive hours of rest. So sometimes what happens is the plane might be ready to go finally, but the crew has timed out, so that extends the delay until they can get a fresh crew to take over. And in some cases, flight attendants are waiting around at the airport for so long because airlines can be a little bit reluctant to just send them to their hotels, which they have to pay for, in order to get that rest kind of started.

Ryssdal: There was an interesting little tidbit in this piece that I hadn’t really considered before. You know, when a flight gets canceled and the airline has to put passengers, a couple hundred maybe, up in a hotel, those passengers are competing for hotel rooms just like the flight attendants are.

Kim: Exactly. And sometimes what can happen is, let’s say your flight’s already been delayed, so you’re in a hotel room, but it gets further delayed. And let’s say the hotel hasn’t gotten confirmation yet of an extra night at the hotel from the airline, then they might get kicked out, and now they don’t know where they should go and sleep the next night. It’s a lot of bureaucratic wires getting tangled sometimes, which impacts how much rest, like genuine rest, they can get, and how well they can work the next day, right?

Ryssdal: And, you know, they say it every time when you’re on a plane, but it’s true — and it’s true, I suppose is what I should say — they’re there for safety. They’re not there to make sure you have a Diet Coke, right?

Kim: Exactly. Those are the very nice things they do for us, but they’re primarily there to protect us.

Ryssdal: And not to mention customers, flyers, we’re just more unruly now, as horrible as that is to say.

Kim: Yeah, it seems that way based on the data. There’s a lot more instances of unruly passenger incidents.

Ryssdal: So obviously, air flight attendant unions are talking to airlines. Airlines are saying, “We’re doing all we can for flight attendants because they’re critical to our success.” What’s the skinny on where things stand?

Kim: First of all, a lot of flight attendant unions and airlines have been negotiating for a very, very long time because COVID sort of pushed back a lot of negotiations. So flight attendants have gone years without pay raises. So there’s a lot of frustration there. There’s certainly been some movement on some of the on-the-ground pay that flight attendants want. A few years ago, Delta actually — which is the only major U.S. carrier to not have a flight attendants union — they offered half-pay during boarding. And United Airlines flight attendants are also negotiating a new contract right now. They want additional pay for time at work on the ground, and they recently authorized a strike if those negotiations break down.