Alex Wong/Getty Images

What’s the longest day you’ve ever had at work?

For flight attendant Rory Kimbrough, a trip from Newark to Saint Martin was delayed and then diverted, and what was originally supposed to be a nine-hour day ballooned into over twice that, to about 19 hours. 

“That was a very long duty day,” recalls Kimbrough, who currently represents JetBlue flight attendants as the executive board member at large for the Transport Workers Union Local 579. 

What made it even worse was that a large chunk of those 19 hours went unpaid.

This is an unfortunate reality flight attendants face: they’re only paid for their flight time, not the whole duty period. That means they’re not paid for the entire (sometimes stressful) boarding process, and when there’s a delay — and there have been some whoppers this summer, with the CrowdStrike IT outage in July leaving some passengers stuck in the airport for days — that’s even more unpaid time at the airport.

While everyone waits to get off the ground, they’re still expected to help passengers if they have questions, and even serve complimentary snacks and drinks as an apology for the hold-up. “I don’t know another job in the world where you can show up, clock in, essentially, and just not get paid,” says Kimbrough.

The fact is, the shoddy way airlines treat flight attendants makes flying worse for everyone. They’re left overworked and underpaid, and a lack of clear, quick communication with flight attendants from the top exacerbates painful delays. 

On Wednesday, flight attendants at United Airlines, represented by the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, overwhelmingly authorized a strike vote. They want not just higher pay, but pay for time on the ground.

“We continue to work toward an industry-leading agreement for our flight attendants, including negotiations this week and every month through November,” a United spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox. The company clarified that the flight attendants are not on strike, but are “exercising their right to conduct an informational picket.”

“Delta is the only major airline that provides boarding pay for our flight attendants, and we’ve been doing it for more than two years,” said a Delta spokesperson in a comment. As of publication, JetBlue had not responded to a request for comment.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Morale among flight attendants right now is pretty bad. “It’s summertime, so it’s already at the lowest of the year,” says Brittany Norris, a member of the Delta AFA Organizing Committee who has been a flight attendant for eight years. There are more people flying, and summer storms can be harder to predict than winter ones, leaving airlines with less time to react and leading to more delays. Planes that are still on the ground, without fully powered air conditioning, can also get dangerously hot. 

When the CrowdStrike meltdown on July 19 took down airline computer systems around the world, over 46,000 flights were delayed. Many passengers were left stranded in airports, but so were flight attendants — including Norris. “I actually ended up losing one of my trips because I was stuck in a city in middle America and the company didn't know where I was,” she says. Among US airlines, Delta was the most impacted by the CrowdStrike issue, with mass flight delays and cancellations lasting almost a week.

One of the hidden issues that can make delays worse is airlines not keeping track of where their crews are or facilitating where they should go — like Delta not knowing where Norris was during the CrowdStrike outage, or flight attendants waiting hours just to get in touch with the airline’s hotel team. Hold-ups on hotels can make delays worse, because waiting at the airport eats into the time that a flight attendant can legally be on duty before they’re required to have a 10-hour rest period. 

“Then when we are ready to go, the customers are like, ‘Why is the crew timing out, we didn't even go anywhere?’” says Norris. What starts as a weather-related delay might turn into a staffing delay, because the flight now needs to wait for a fresh crew to arrive.

All these hours at the airport is time during which flight attendants aren’t getting paid. In recent years, some flight attendants have reported experiencing homelessness due to their low wages. Others work multiple jobs to afford basics.

Unions have been pushing to change the frustrating practice of not getting paid for their entire workday, which is standard in the US aviation industry, and a few years ago, Delta — the only major US carrier without a flight attendants’ union — offered a concession: Flight attendants will now get half pay during boarding.

American Airlines, in its new union contract with its flight attendants, also agreed to give half pay during boarding. American told the Washington Post that its concessions to the union last month would provide "quality-of-life improvements" for its flight attendants, and that it was "a contract we’re proud of and one our flight attendants have earned."

Workers want to be compensated for the entire time, not just a fraction of it. A class action lawsuit filed against United Airlines in June argued that not paying flight attendants for all of their duty period is a labor violation. 

Many of us have groused about how much more frustrating and conflict-ridden air travel feels today compared to before the pandemic. In fact, the number of “unruly passenger” reports has shot up since 2019, according to the Federal Aviation Administration — and it’s mostly flight attendants who have had to deal with such passengers and ensure the rest of us can get to our destinations.

One way to make air travel more pleasant, especially when there’s an annoying delay, is this: better pay and treatment for the employees who try to make flying as smooth an experience as possible.

ae-photos

A grave mistake: Former president Donald Trump’s campaign is facing backlash for filming and photographing a visit to Arlington National Cemetery — where photography for political purposes is illegal — earlier this week. The campaign filmed in a restricted section of the grounds where deceased Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are buried. One family granted permission,  but another did not. Now, a cemetery employee has filed an incident report regarding an altercation during the visit, but declined to press charges, fearing retaliation from Trump supporters.  [New York Times]

New guardrails to protect the election: The race is still close, and legislators are preparing for potential bumps after November 5. If former President Trump refuses to accept the results of the election, new rules should protect against fake electors and delayed certification efforts. [Wall Street Journal] 

“If I build a car that is far more dangerous than other cars, don’t do any safety testing, release it, and it ultimately leads to people getting killed, I will probably be held liable and have to pay damages, if not criminal penalties.

If I build a search engine that (unlike Google) has as the first result for “how can I commit a mass murder” detailed instructions on how best to carry out a spree killing, and someone uses my search engine and follows the instructions, I likely won’t be held liable, thanks largely to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

So here’s a question: Is an AI assistant more like a car, where we can expect manufacturers to do safety testing or be liable if they get people killed? Or is it more like a search engine?”

—Senior Future Perfect writer Kelsey Piper on the current debate over California’s SB 1047 legislation that mandates safety training for companies that spend more than $100 million on training a “frontier model” in AI — like the in-progress GPT-5. 

Andriy Onufriyenko

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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