United Threatens To Fire Flight Attendants Who Pick Up Trips They Know They Can’t Work—Then Collect The Pay

United Airlines is threatening to fire flight attendants who pick up trips they already know they won’t be able to work, collecting the pay when those trips are taken off their schedules. The airline says some employees are using advance knowledge of flight delays to do this. They know their current trip will get them home too late to work another assignment, but United’s computers haven’t caught up yet. So they grab the extra flying while the system still lets them. Then they wait for the delay to knock it off their schedule with pay. In a memo shared in a flight attendant discussion, United calls this “conflict trading” and warns that it can lead to termination. The airline describes the practice as “impermissible and fraudulent.” 🌐🌐🌐 by u/Accomplished-Plane19 in flightattendants How A Flight Delay Becomes Pay For Another Trip Flight attendants can trade assignments with each other and pick up available flying. That gives them flexibility over their schedules and lets them earn more by working additional trips. A “pairing” is a work trip, which can include several flights over multiple days. United says employees are exploiting the time it takes for information about a delay to reach the system that checks whether they’re eligible to work another trip. A flight attendant is already working a trip. They learn they’ll be getting back substantially later than scheduled (e.g. a maintenance delay or an assigned departure time that hasn’t reached the scheduling system). They pick up a trip starting the next morning. The computer still thinks they’ll get home on time, with enough rest before the new assignment, so it accepts the pickup. The delay finally gets entered. Now the flight attendant won’t have enough rest between assignments, or another scheduling restriction prevents them from working the new trip. The new trip gets removed with pay protection. If the extra trip carries five hours of pay credit and the flight attendant’s rate is $60 an hour, that’s $300 for an assignment they never work. They’ve added an obligation to United’s payroll while knowing they won’t be available to do the flying. When flight attendants say they’ve “gone illegal” for a trip, they mean working it would violate a rest requirement or scheduling limit. That can include a protection in their union contract – an employee who committed to work doesn’t lose pay because United got them home late from an earlier assignment. And losing a trip doesn’t necessarily mean getting paid to go home. United’s says that the computer accepting a trade doesn’t absolve them, though: You must have the intent and ability to operate the trip being picked up or traded into, whether from Open Time or directly from another flight attendant. The memo targets what an employee knows when they take the trip: Trips arranged in advance, then disrupted: A flight attendant schedules consecutive trips with enough rest between them. An unexpected delay subsequently makes the second trip impossible. That’s an ordinary pay-protection situation. Trips scheduled close together: There’s nothing in this memo that makes a tight but workable schedule misconduct. A pickup during a delay: A delay alone doesn’t establish a violation if there’s still enough time to work the new assignment. The memo describes someone who already knows “with reasonable certainty” that they won’t be permitted to work it once the system updates. A pickup using information the system hasn’t caught up with: If the employee already knows the delay will make the trip unworkable and takes it anyway to collect the pay, that’s the conduct United is threatening to punish. Some commenters argue that the airline accepted the trade, the airline’s own delay created the conflict, and the contract promises pay protection. Several invoke their experience at American Airlines, saying management there tried to deny protection for similar pickups and the contract didn’t permit it. But United’s memo threatens discipline for making the trade. It doesn’t announce that contractual pay protection for ordinary disruptions is going away. An employee could have a claim to the pay and still face a separate allegation that they violated trading rules to obtain it. United says its requirement that employees intend to work the trips they acquire has been affirmed in multiple arbitration cases. United Has Already Been Firing Employees Over Trip Trading In July, I wrote about United flight attendants selling desirable trips to junior colleagues. The union reported an increase in terminations over alleged trading violations and said it would challenge the dismissals, including cases where it believed United was inferring wrongdoing from trading patterns. This memo also warns against “trip parking.” The union describes several prohibited practices: Temporarily putting a trip on another employee’s schedule to make trades that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, then reacquiring the trip. Acquiring trips to control or broker them without intending to fly them. Money doesn’t have to change hands for this to violate the rule. Picking up trips to save them for friends, or to keep other employees from getting them. The union and airline publicly warned in September 2023 that an arbitrator had found trip parking impermissible under their contract and that it could result in termination. There’s a stronger financial objection to conflict trading than to employees selling desirable assignments to each other. A sale can leave the flight covered and redistribute money between employees. Here, United takes on an additional pay obligation and still needs someone else to work the flight. A pickup can also temporarily take a trip away from another employee who could actually fly it. But here it seems that United has a software problem. Employees can know more about an impending delay than the system deciding whether they can accept additional work. Updating that system with the operational information the airline already has would prevent at least some of these trades from going through. That seems like a better approach than trying to delve into what an employee knew, and when they knew it. Topics on this page