OUR
STORY

Like many industries, the COVID-19 pandemic created massive upheaval and sparked increasing greed, with Delta being no exception. As the reality of the pandemic set in, Delta and the rest of the airline industry came to the government ready to accept billions of dollars in bailouts, loans, and aid. That influx of cash wasn’t enough for Delta.

Delta begged thousands of their workers to take an unpaid leave of absence, which many took out of a belief that it would help the most profitable airline survive. Along with the smaller payroll expense, Delta saw an opportunity to transform the workforce into a younger, and more importantly, cheaper one by offering buyout packages. For every top-of-scale employee Delta could replace them with 2 new employees for roughly the same cost. This is how we have ended up in a situation where only 30% of the 18,000 agents are top-of-scale. When workers did return, they were greeted with a 20% cut in their scheduled hours. The real slap in the face was when management and above were reimbursed their pay cut in the form of a year-end bonus while the workers were never made whole. But the greed did not stop there.

In the years since workers have returned, Delta has systematically reduced full-time schedules by up to 25% in some stations. They have altered the way we receive Paid Personal Time, making it more difficult to use which in turn means they pay out less of it. Next was changing our healthcare to a third-party provider with no warning one month after our open enrollment had closed. This has resulted in less coverage, more expensive procedures, and a smaller pharmacy pool. The most recent incident was the delaying of a raise so long that some other airline workers had received two raises in the same period. All the while Ed Bastian received a 265% compensation increase in 2023.