Delta’s Flight Attendants Say a 36-Hour Week Can Still Mean Overtime

A proposed class action filed in California state court on October 16 accuses Delta Air Lines of failing to pay nonexempt flight attendants for work that falls outside the time the aircraft is in the air. The complaint points to security checks, annual training, preparing aircraft for boarding, cleaning planes and other duties.

The legal hook is California’s daily overtime rule, which requires extra pay after eight hours in a workday rather than only after 40 in a week. That means a crew member who works just three days could still accumulate overtime. Delta is a nonunion carrier, so it cannot lean on the Railway Labor Act exclusion that unionized airlines can raise against state wage orders.

Delta has defenses. The California Supreme Court’s 2020 Oman decision upheld Delta’s pay structure against a minimum-wage challenge, and a 2021 Ninth Circuit ruling in an airport-worker case found that pay for time spent in federally mandated security screening was not established. Delta also started separate boarding pay in June 2022, set at half a flight attendant’s hourly flight rate for the scheduled boarding period.

Analyst Gary Leff, who wrote about the case, expects the screening claim to struggle but sees a plausible path for crew based at Los Angeles whose required pre-flight tasks pushed them past eight hours in a day. The article did not report a Delta response, and the case is at its earliest stage.

Sources: View from the Wing