United Flight Attendants Built A Black Market Selling The Best Trips — Now They’re Getting Fired

Flight attendants at United Airlines have been selling the benefits of their senior to junior cabin crew, and the airline is cracking down, according to its union. Cabin crew website Paddle Your Own Kanoo flags that flight attendants union AFA-CWA is telling its members that United Airlines has started firing a larger number of flight attendants for trip-brokering violations. During the past several months, AFA has seen a “significant increase” in members terminated for alleged trip-trading misconduct. A senior flight attendant bids for a desirable trip, often an international pairing or dates surrounding a holiday, without intending to work it. They transfer that trip to a junior employee in exchange for cash, gifts, or an illicit benefit. Within the flight attendant community, this kind of trade has long had crude slang attached to it — including a version with “FCO” as shorthand for Rome — because the alleged exchanges are not always just cash or gifts. AFA says it intends to challenge the dismissals – “push back on every case” – and seek reinstatement for affected members. Their position is that United is merely inferring guilt from obtaining the best trips and transferring them immediately to junior employees (often on a repeated basis). I’ve been writing about the practice for nearly a decade. United has been warning flight attendants not to do this dating back to at least 2019. And we’ve seen American Airlines cracking down on this practice for several years. In fact, at American the flight attendants union helps the airline track down and fire flight attendants who sell trips. In fact, that’s something that even went into the new flight attendant contract two years ago. Nonetheless, the practice continues. Flight attendants often think they’re being clever, discussing trip sales online but using code like exchanging ‘cookies’ for ‘kisses’. Those messages never go over well when the flight attendant gets hauled in to explain themselves. Interestingly, Southwest’s flight attendant contract actually permits the practice. There’s even been open discussion in union materials about flight attendants failing to pay for promised trades – “not paying cash posted on trip trades” as an airline culture problem. JetBlue’s agreement doesn’t expressly prohibit the practice, either. Of course, neither Southwest nor JetBlue has especially desireable trips like Rome, Paris, Tokyo and Sydney! At some level, an airline shouldn’t care. They’re still paying crew for the trip. They may even be paying lower wages as a result. It creates unhappy employees with higher seniority than those actually working the trip, though. Mostly it’s an intra-union issue – and the unions usually want to protect their most senior members (who are monetizing the asset, selling the trips) but each union’s politics will vary. Sometimes the union’s most vocal members (voters) are the ones who see themselves losing out from these trades. Ultimately with assigning schedules based on seniority, employees are getting something of value – which may be valued more by someone else. Naturally a secondary market develops, and both parties benefit from the exchange. It’s the natural result of inefficiently allocating what employees want most (specific trips) based on seniority. Here, the company and union are fighting over the symptoms of a broken duty assignment system. Topics on this page