United flight attendants missed out on millions in profit sharing
We have previously discussed the union grievance process and how sometimes it’s not all AFA cracks it up to be.
One example from United AFA is notable: after waiting seven years to resolve a grievance about profit sharing, United flight attendants saw the maze of the grievance process firsthand: AFA’s claim regarding their profit sharing allocation was dismissed by an arbitrator who found that AFA’s grievance was filed too late. The grievance process not only left United flight attendants in limbo for years, but, according to AFA, flight attendants lost out on millions of dollars in profit sharing.
So, what happened at United?
- 2010: United and Continental merge.
- March 2011: United announced a combined profit sharing plan and informed AFA.
- February 2012: United pays profit sharing to United and Continental flight attendants.
- June 2012: AFA filed a grievance against United claiming that the company’s profit sharing payout in February 2012 violated its contract. AFA argued that while United properly included both United and Continental profit in its calculation, it should have included only United flight attendants in the payout. According to AFA, United’s approach meant that United flight attendants received less profit sharing than they should have.
- August 2012: United denied the grievance, arguing that it didn’t have merit and that AFA had waited too long to file the grievance.
AFA appealed the company’s decision, and five years later, an arbitration hearing began.
- October 2017 and January 2018: United AFA’s grievance hearings take place.
- January 2019: The arbitrator dismissed AFA’s nearly seven-year-old grievance, agreeing with United that AFA’s filing had come too late since they were informed of the new profit sharing plan in March 2011.
- April 2019: AFA filed a lawsuit seeking to set the arbitration decision aside, saying that, from 2012-2016, flight attendants had “been wrongfully deprived of millions in profit sharing payments which United has kept for itself.”
- April 2020: The court dismissed AFA’s case, concluding that just because “[AFA] disagrees with the Board’s interpretation of the [United AFA Collective Bargaining Agreement] (CBA) does not mean that the Board exceeded its authority.”
The bottom line: Filing a grievance is not the fix-all AFA makes it out to be. The process is long and complex and can take years to reach a conclusion. Even at the end of the road, a win is not guaranteed.
Don’t buy into empty AFA campaign promises. Learn the facts about life with AFA, and how we do things differently at Delta. Don’t Risk It. Don’t Sign It.
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