ATLANTA — Delta Air Lines stands apart from its competitors in many ways.

It’s the first U.S. airline to hit 100 years old and the country’s most profitable. But throughout its history, the Atlanta-based carrier has also stood out by remaining largely union-free.

Just about 20% of Delta’s 100,000-person workforce is unionized, compared to 87% at American Airlines and 82% at United and Southwest. And that “direct relationship” with its employees, Delta has long argued, is a fundamental part of the “Delta difference.”

Only the company’s pilots, flight dispatchers and its subsidiary Endeavor Air’s pilots and flight attendants are organized.

Two active labor campaigns are trying once again to change that among the airline’s flight attendants and ramp and cargo employees. The Teamsters pulled back on a recent push to organize its mechanics.

But these efforts follow decades of unsuccessful attempts to organize the carrier headquartered in the union-averse South.

Twelve votes by four unions in 20 years have failed at Delta, the company’s chief people officer, Allison Ausband, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“We respect the right of the Delta people. It’s their choice to unionize or not, but they have said no 12 times.”

But the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) tell the AJC they’re more optimistic than ever about their prospects, despite an ongoing Delta campaign against them.

“It is possible to do what’s never been done in history before,” said Sara Nelson, president of the AFA. Pulling off a vote among Delta’s 28,000 flight attendants, she said, would amount to the largest in the industry’s history.

Richie Johnsen, general vice president for air transport at IAM, told the AJC this latest effort among the company’s 20,000 ramp and cargo employees is going “better than I’ve ever seen it on the property before. I think that we have a real, real chance of filing for an election.”

The efforts come amid an uptick in labor organizing across the country, including in Georgia since COVID-19.

‘The Delta difference’

When asked why Delta has stayed largely union-free, Ausband says it “started Day 1” with the company’s founder, C.E. Woolman.

She paraphrased a quote of his: “Every airline can buy the same airplane, they can buy the same seat, they can serve the same meal, but what they cannot replicate is the people of Delta.”

Crucial to maintaining this, Ausband said, is the company’s “open-door policy” credited to Woolman.

Ausband says today that policy helps leaders stay in touch with employees and “makes us resilient. It makes us faster in solving problems for our people.”

Ronald Allen, a former Delta CEO, told the AJC that after Woolman’s death, people were concerned the carrier would lose this open-door culture.

So Delta’s then-senior vice president of personnel, Tom Beebe, decided to formalize it by giving every employee a chance to meet with their top departmental leader every 12-18 months.

“That’s how we’d learn,” Allen recalled.

While that formalized meeting schedule is no longer in place, Delta leaders regularly hold internal town halls and open Q&A’s and employees are free to request meetings with their leadership.

Even pro-union employees today agree that this still works well.

Delta does “a good job of maintaining a direct, friendly relationship with their employees,” said Jim Starnes, a Delta dispatcher and VP of its dispatchers’ union chapter, PAFCA-DAL.

Starnes countered, however, that in his experience being unionized doesn’t “impede” that relationship. In fact, he said, “we want to enhance it.”

Unionized employees are free to meet with their leadership independently, accompanied by a union representative or work through a union committee, he said.

While Nelson with the AFA also points to Delta’s history to tell the story of its union-free past, she calls that same culture “paternalistic.”

The airline was able to withstand waves of unionization across the industry by using the “sentiment in the South” against unions, she said.

The company “used any means possible to drive the message that Delta was different,” Nelson said. “And so even though it’s very common to have a union in the airline industry, you didn’t need one at Delta.”

But the Atlanta carrier nearly lost that union-free track record after its 2008 merger with highly unionized, Minneapolis-based Northwest.

The merger triggered seven labor votes within the newly combined workforce, but all failed.

“There is no better testament to how well the direct relationship works at Delta than the voices of the majority clearly stating time and again they want to preserve our special relationship and values,” then-CEO Richard Anderson said at the time.

His message rings true today for Kaitlyn Hiemenz, a Delta flight attendant who opposes unionization.

“When I come into work, I feel supported. I feel like I could come to my leaders if I needed feedback,” she said. “I don’t feel a need to bring someone else in to create anything better than that.”

Ted Reed, a veteran aviation reporter who recently published a book about the power of the industry’s labor unions, said the biggest driver of Delta’s mostly union-free track record boils down to its ability to compensate well.

The company pays close attention to other union contracts, he said, and reacts quickly. “There’s intense pressure on Delta … to keep up with the others.”

“That’s how they keep out the unions. They keep the unions out by paying better,” he said.

The pitches

But not all Delta employees agree that it’s enough.

Jonnie Lane, a member of the Delta AFA Organizing Committee and a flight attendant of 17 years, said while Delta treats employees “fairly well,” she’s frustrated by a lack of “transparency” in how the company makes disciplinary decisions.

She cited a recent memo announcing the carrier would be changing flight attendants’ “performance development” disciplinary action process, which she said they have no input in going forward.

“A lot of decisions are made and we’re told after the fact,” she said. “We are the work group that interfaces with the customers the most, yet we have the least amount of say on a lot of those practices that would benefit the company and our bottom line.”

There are also the company’s recent flight attendant uniform changes. Delta scrapped new designs in 2020 after employee complaints and lawsuits alleging they caused rashes.

Just five years later it is in the process of abandoning the purple uniforms altogether. But after employee feedback on the new designs, the company has already abandoned several of them.

At many unionized carriers, formal committees must approve uniform changes, Lane said.

AFA spokesperson Taylor Garland told the AJC, “If we were part of that process, and there was a real opportunity for feedback before announcing it, (Delta) probably would have avoided that disaster in the first place.”

Delta spokesperson Anthony Black said the company has gathered more than 50,000 pieces of feedback on the designs and said the approach is “more holistic and reflects feedback from more flight attendant voices than would come from a small set of union leaders.”

Eric Criswell, chair of Delta’s pilot union, ALPA, said they help members “every day” navigate issues with the company, especially with scheduling rules and regulations. As a result, “The pilot’s not out there alone,” he said.

Finally, there is the role of a union during a time of crisis, like a crash.

At unionized carriers, unions are formal parties during investigations alongside the airline, Nelson said. AFA and ALPA, for example, are involved in the two 2025 airline crash investigations, including the Delta incident in Toronto, because it was operated by Endeavor Air.

“You don’t need a union until you need a union,” Nelson said. “And then it’s too late.”

Ausband said a key reason Delta doesn’t need further unionization is that it already sets total compensation standards in the industry.

Delta was the first U.S. carrier to pay its flight attendants for hours spent during boarding, for example. That happened “because we’re close to our flight attendants, and we listened to them,” she said.

While unions argue none of that is guaranteed without a contract, Ausband says the company has a “proven track record” that “we don’t need a union to tell us how we need to pay our people.”

But boarding pay, Reed said, was something under discussion already at unionized carriers before Delta added it. However, since those contract negotiations take time, Delta was able to move quickly in the interim to add the benefit first.

Delta’s profit-sharing policy, which paid out $1.4 billion to employees this year — the most in the industry — also roots to its pilots’ union contract negotiations during the company’s bankruptcy in 2007, Criswell said.

Pilots first negotiated the deal in their contract, and Delta then chose to extend it to all employees.

Usually, when it comes to their contract negotiations, “We boost up the other people in our profession, not the other way around,” said Jeff Donaldson, president of Delta’s PAFCA dispatchers chapter.

The prospects

Airline unionization is especially difficult because, per federal regulations, the cards that employees sign to signal intent expire after a year.

Johnsen with IAM says they would have enough signatures to hold an election now if they could get an expired one-third of the 10,000 cards they’ve collected re-signed.

Starnes with PAFCA said the latest efforts are also fighting an uphill battle culturally.

“It’s been a tough pull really since the merger … because the workforce at Delta generationally has changed pretty dramatically,” he said. “A lot of those legacy employees at Northwest who were very prounion have left.”

But so long as Delta remains largely un-unionized, efforts to organize are likely to continue given its unique status in the industry.

Delta’s Ausband said she expects that’s in part because of the estimated millions their employees would represent in dues: “The unions are a business.”

Johnsen countered that there’s “no money in this. … We do it because we believe in lifting workers up.” And he thinks that Delta’s wave of younger, new, “motivated” employees are an opportunity for the effort.

“As long as there’s people that are un-unionized that are saying, ‘I’m getting less than my fair share, and I want a union,’ unions will come to the rescue. That’s what we do.”

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(Staff writer Zachery Hansen contributed reporting.)

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