American Airlines Started Grading Flight Attendants. California Law May Get In The Way

American Airlines has started grading the performance of flight attendants. And flight attendants are worried that this is the start of holding them accountable for service. In fact, the flight attendants union is arguing that the new scoring system violates California privacy law, at least for flight attendants who are based at LAX. American’s New ‘Me@Work’ Scores For Cabin Crew American is drawing on 12 months of passenger survey results and customer experience scores; attendance, predeparture work and door-closing; delays coded as flight attendant-related; timeliness of required incident reports; Microsoft Teams usage; electronic flight bag compliance; plus credit card approvals as a possible score “accelerator.” For now, the grades are primarily informational: they let flight attendants and management see performance data but do not meaningfully determine pay, schedules or assignments. Performance measurement is a good idea! American should be able to identify weak performers, coach or retrain them, remove employees who remain unsuitable, and materially reward excellent flight attendants. High performers currently receive essentially the same compensation and treatment as colleagues whose work they must cover. That’s a mistake. However, the scoring methodology also has serious flaws: Passenger ratings reflect delays, catering, Wi-Fi, cleanliness and other factors outside an individual flight attendant’s control. Delay codes can create blame games and may punish cabin crews for problems caused by gates, catering, cleaners, wheelchairs, passengers or maintenance. Door close targets can encourage crews to ignore customer problems merely to close on time. Measuring how quickly or frequently safety and service reports are filed could discourage employees from reporting incidents at all. The effort is a reasonable first attempt at accountability, but so far it’s more dashboard than management system. And so it makes sense that no one is yet held to account for the results. Why The Union Says This Effort Is Against The Law APFA’s argument is that American may be failing to provide the notice, disclosure, access and correction mechanisms required when collecting personal information from California employees. The California Consumer Privacy Act provides rights to know what information is collected and how it is used, to correct inaccuracies and in some circumstances to request deletion. And so the union says, Workers have a “right to know when employers are monitoring them.” Employees require “access to their personal data.” Scores rely on “data we cannot independently review, verify, or challenge.” APFA demands “Transparency, accuracy, and accountability.” APFA says American has assembled individual employee records without allowing flight attendants to see the specific information, test its accuracy, correct or delete eligible records, or contest misleading inputs. Does The Union Have A Point? The claim the union makes that ’employees are unable to see their data’ seems to require triggering with a request that’s then denied. And claims about being unable to correct inaccurate information requires first that there are objective factual errors. There’s no broad right to delete employment records, however, nor is there a general California Consumer Privacy Act right to appeal a performance score. Private lawsuits appear generally limited to security breaches so unless they interest regulators I’m not sure how far they’ll get with this. Employment records are covered by the act, American has provided notice to employees about the information being collected and how it will be used. That’s why it’s been so contentious. The strongest argument the union has, it seems to me, is that California law prohibits using already-collected information for an additional purpose incompatible with the disclosed original purpose without providing new notice. That means American can’t pivot to using these scores for accountability rather than just information without informing flight attendants first. Where the union may have a better argument, but which they don’t make here, is that 2026 CCPA regulations require a risk assessment for automated processing that infers or extrapolates an employee’s performance at work based on systematic observation. For new covered processing that started after January 1, 2026, the assessment generally has to occur before processing begins. For processing that began before this year, companies have until December 31, 2027 for this assessment. It’s unclear whether American was merely collecting raw operational data before 2026 or was actually processing those records into Me@Work scores last year. The union wouldn’t have had a right to see the assessment, but there’s a potential angle of attack here. Under California law, the airline has to provide a meaningful privacy notice, cannot secretly repurpose data for an undisclosed use, has to disclose covered employee data upon a proper request and must correct demonstrably inaccurate records. It’s not clear that American has run afoul of any of this though, and employees don’t have an unconditional right to delete the records or appeal scores. But Federal Law May Preempt Much Of This Anyway Flight attendant performance and employment data is explicitly covered by the union’s contract, and so evaluating American’s conduct likely requires interpreting that contract, which would mean many claims would get preempted by the Railway Labor Act. Much of the union’s complaint tracks rights laid out in the collective bargaining agreement almost word for word. Under Hawaiian Airlines v. Norris and the Ninth Circuit’s en banc decision in Alaska Airlines v. Schurke, a state law claim is preempted by mandatory arbitration under the Railway Labor Act when the claimed right is created by the collective bargaining agreement or it’s independently created by state law but resolving the claim requires an interpretation of disputed contract language. Section 37.O of the American–APFA agreement provides that: Documents regarding flight-attendant job performance must generally be kept in a single department file. Potentially disciplinary derogatory documents must be provided to the flight attendant. Passenger complaints may be included only where the conduct was within the flight attendant’s control and the employee is identified. Flight attendants may submit written responses and challenge derogatory documents. Employees and authorized APFA representatives may inspect and duplicate the department file, expressly including “electronic records used to track job performance or attendance.” A decisionmaker would potentially have to determine whether a Me@Work score is a “document regarding job performance,” whether the underlying data belongs in the “single department file,” whether the score and its inputs are “electronic records used to track job performance or attendance,” whether passenger survey data are “passenger complaints,” what constitutes a sufficient contractual opportunity to “challenge” a document, and whether the contractual removal and retention rules cover raw data, calculated scores or only derogatory letters and notations. A claim that American is violating flight attendant rights by withholding the score inputs, denying challenges or maintaining the information outside the designated personnel file looks like a classic Railway Labor Act minor dispute. APFA can’t turn contractual disputes into California privacy law violations. However, pure privacy act claims can surive that American failed to provide an adequate Notice at Collection, disclosed one purpose for collecting the information and processed it for a materially incompatible purpose, that their collection or use was not reasonably necessary and proportionate, or that a flight attendant submitted a formal request for specific personal information or to correct information and American failed to respond. American has a strong Railway Labor Act defense to what the union is actually complaining about – that flight attendants cannot inspect, verify, correct or challenge Me@Work performance records – but that doesn’t mean they’re free of all California legal risk. Topics on this page