The Company That Answers When You Get Hurt at Work

Passengers are often astonished when a flight attendant declines to lift their bag into the overhead bin. It reads as a courtesy failure. It isn’t. Flight attendants are trained not to lift passenger bags because, as a spokesperson for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA put it, lifting baggage is a leading cause of injury for cabin crew. Carriers back this up in writing. Delta’s policy says flight attendants are “unable to proactively assist” with placing bags in overhead bins. Southwest calls assistance voluntary hospitality, not a job requirement. American and United guidance puts the responsibility on the passenger.

Here’s the part the airlines don’t put on a placard. One reason the discouragement exists is that an injury on the job means a workers’ compensation claim, and the same AFA-CWA spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that if lifting is against policy, an injury from lifting may not be covered. So the flight attendant who hoists your 45-pound roller bag is gambling with her own shoulder and, potentially, her own claim.

This is where carriers talk out of both sides of their mouth. On paper, they stand behind the policy. In practice, the relentless pressure for high service ratings never accounts for it. A passenger who wanted help with a bag and didn’t get it takes it as rudeness, and that passenger doesn’t file a complaint against the carry-on policy. They rate the crew. When the bad survey score or the angry letter arrives, it isn’t the policy that gets called into the office. It’s the flight attendant. The rule that protects the airline from a workers’ comp claim offers her no protection at all from the customer it annoyed.

At American, that pressure now has a dashboard. The company’s Me@Work platform assigns each flight attendant a running performance score built from customer satisfaction surveys, attendance, punctuality, onboard credit card sales, and even activity on company-issued iPhones. American says the score is a self-development tool, not a basis for discipline. The union that flight attendants built, APFA, has filed a formal dispute over the rollout and says crew were scored on months of quietly collected data before anyone told them the system existed. Flight attendants who have spent careers watching customer complaints follow them into meetings with supervisors can be forgiven for reading it differently. We covered what Me@Work says about American’s management philosophy in a previous piece.

Read article: Americans Me@Work rating system

Lift the bag and risk your body and your claim. Follow the policy and risk your score. The airline wrote both rules.

When someone does get hurt, whether from a bag, a beverage cart, or clear-air turbulence at 34,000 feet, a company most passengers have never heard of picks up the phone. It’s time you met Sedgwick.

The middleman with the tagline

Sedgwick Claims Management Services is not an insurance company, and the distinction matters. Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Memphis, Sedgwick is the world’s largest third-party administrator, a company that other companies hire to handle their injury, disability, and leave claims. Many large employers, including American Airlines, are self-insured for workers’ compensation. The airline pays claims out of its own pocket. Sedgwick decides, on the airline’s behalf, which claims get paid.

The injured worker is not Sedgwick’s customer. The employer is. Sedgwick describes itself as a pure fee-for-service business that takes on no underwriting risk. Its marketing promises clients it will get injured workers “healthy faster and back to work sooner than anyone in the industry” while containing costs. Its corporate tagline, printed on everything, is “caring counts.”

The caring has been lucrative. Sedgwick has been owned by private equity for more than 25 years, passed between firms like a rental property in an appreciating neighborhood. KKR bought majority control in 2014 for $2.4 billion. The Carlyle Group took over in 2018 in a deal valued at $6.7 billion. In late 2024, an investment from Altas Partners pegged Sedgwick’s total value at roughly $13.2 billion, on gross revenue of $4.62 billion in 2023, according to Business Insurance. Its product, remember, is deciding whether injured workers get benefits.

What the gauntlet looks like

Attorneys who fight Sedgwick describe a consistent toolkit: adjusters trained to protect the employer’s bottom line, nurse case managers tracking your medical appointments, independent medical exams designed to shrink your claim, and utilization review, which one workers’ comp attorney defines bluntly: your records go to a non-practicing physician in another state who has never examined you, is paid a fee, and can be expected to declare your treatment unnecessary.

Attorneys have a rooting interest, so look at the documented record instead.

In California, a grocery worker named Charles Romano developed a severe infection after surgery for a work injury. Sedgwick did not authorize treatment for the infection and kept delaying his claim. His health deteriorated, and in 2008 he died. The California Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board cited his case, an investigation found 75 mandatory penalties, and in 2018 Sedgwick settled with the state for $1,129,600. A man died waiting for authorization, and the price came to about a million dollars, paid a decade later.

daisyBill, a California workers’ comp billing firm, says it has filed formal audit complaints with the state reporting more than 214,000 law and regulation violations by Sedgwick since 2022 alone.

In New York last year, the MTA handed its workers’ comp processing to Sedgwick under a contract costing taxpayers more than $51 million over three years. Within two months, more than 3,500 injured transit workers had their checks delayed. Transport Workers Union Local 100, which reported Sedgwick could not process roughly half the existing claims, filed a grievance, and its president told the MTA board the last thing an injured worker should worry about is paying the light bill.

And at a recent TWU convention, Local 579, the union JetBlue flight attendants built and run, introduced a resolution accusing Sedgwick of treating injured workers with abuse, disrespect, and mistreatment. It passed unanimously.

The airline connection

If you work for a U.S. airline, odds are decent that Sedgwick is in your life. American’s flight attendants file injury-on-duty claims through Sedgwick, and APFA’s own guidance walks members through what to do when Sedgwick denies them. JetBlue routes crewmember disability and family leave through Sedgwick, per the company’s own leave handbook. Delta flight attendants, who have no union contract, started a public petition demanding Delta drop Sedgwick, describing delays, denials, and a process that forces employees to hire private attorneys to access benefits they already earned.

The hardest fights are over injuries that don’t leave a bruise. When American rolled out new Twin Hill uniforms to roughly 70,000 employees in 2016, flight attendants reported rashes, hives, headaches, and breathing problems by the thousands. NIOSH tallied 3,686 symptom reports among American’s flight attendants, nearly 800 involving medical care. In June 2025, a jury awarded five crew members $18.6 million. One American flight attendant told the World Socialist Web Site that, to her knowledge, not a single colleague had won workers’ comp for uniform reactions; they kept getting framed as personal allergies rather than workplace injuries. It has gone differently where flight attendants put their union on the problem. After uniform reactions surfaced at Alaska Airlines in 2012, flight attendants there worked through AFA-CWA to push the carrier toward the OEKO-TEX Standard 100 chemical certification, and in 2020 Alaska and Horizon rolled out the first U.S. airline uniforms certified to that standard.

Fume events, where engine oil or hydraulic fluid contaminates the air crews breathe, follow the same script. A JetBlue pilot suffered a fume event in 2017 that left him with toxic encephalopathy, tremors, and migraines. Two years later, JetBlue denied his claim on the grounds that his condition did not exist, and if it did, the flight wasn’t the cause. An Oregon workers’ comp judge set aside every denial, awarded him hundreds of thousands in attorney fees, and tacked on a 25 percent penalty, finding that fume events happen hundreds of times a year and expose tens of thousands of crew and passengers. There is still no federal requirement for flight attendants to report fume events, which is why nobody can say precisely how often they happen. AFA-CWA has spent years backing the Cabin Air Safety Act, which would mandate standardized FAA fume reporting, public data, and carbon monoxide detectors on aircraft, and this year threw its support behind the bipartisan Safe Air on Airplanes Act.

These bills keep dying quietly. Versions have languished in committee since 2017, and Airlines for America, the carriers’ lobbying arm, told the Los Angeles Times that mandated monitoring requirements are “premature” without scientific studies validating a health concern. Those studies are scarce for a reason. When Congress ordered the FAA to measure the chemicals in fume events back in 2003, the airlines refused to let flight attendants carry air samplers aboard, according to an FAA-funded research report. Follow the loop. The industry blocks the instruments that would produce the data, cites the missing data as proof there’s no problem, and hands the resulting injury claims to a company like Sedgwick, which denies them for lack of proof. Nobody in that loop ever has to say no to a sick crew member. The system says it for them.

Sometimes the system gets help. In January 2023, OSHA announced that a whistleblower investigation found American had retaliated against flight attendants who reported illnesses from jet fuel fumes seeping into the cabin, docking their attendance points and discouraging them from reporting work-related injuries. The proposed penalty came to $6,837. American contested the findings, with a spokesman saying the company respectfully disagreed and that safety is always American’s top priority.

Why it matters

Every dollar an administrator saves an airline is a dollar that was supposed to reach someone who got hurt doing their job. The system works exactly as designed. Airlines write policies that shift injury risk onto workers, then hire a specialist whose business model is minimizing what those injuries cost. Sedgwick’s valuation doubles in six years. The worker gets a claim number and a phone tree.

And the next time a flight attendant doesn’t reach for your bag, you’ll know she isn’t being rude. She’s read the fine print.

What you can do

If you’re a passenger, the fix is free: lift your own bag, or check it, and if a crew member’s service impressed you, say so to the airline in writing. Compliment letters are data points too.

If you’re an airline worker, report every injury, no matter how minor it seems, and get every denial in writing. Sedgwick is required to state its reasons for a denial in writing, and your state’s workers’ compensation commission is where disputes go. APFA maintains injury-on-duty resources for American flight attendants. AFA-CWA trains its members not to lift passenger bags and carries the fume and uniform fights to Capitol Hill. Delta flight attendants, meanwhile, are organizing to build their own union with AFA. Across the industry, unions are dragging Sedgwick’s conduct into the open, one resolution and one grievance at a time. That’s how the Romano settlement happened. That’s how the MTA got hauled in front of its own board. The record only gets corrected when somebody insists on it, politely, firmly, and in writing.

Sources

• Atticus — “How Sedgwick Workers’ Compensation Works” (June 2024)
• Business Insurance — “Private-equity investment values Sedgwick at $13.2 billion” (September 2024)
• Financier Worldwide — “Carlyle Group in, KKR out of Sedgwick” (2018)
• Sedgwick press release — “Sedgwick announces closing of $1B equity investment from Altas Partners” (November 2024)
• Stone Point Capital — Sedgwick portfolio page
• Sedgwick — Claims administration services page
• Slominski Law — “Is Your Virginia Worker’s Comp Claim Managed By Sedgwick?” (March 2022)
• Moebes Law — “Sedgwick CMS Fined Over $1M for Its Utilization Review Practices in CA”
• daisyBill — “Labor: ‘Predatory’ Sedgwick Is ‘a Menace to Workers'” (2025)
• The City — “Union Slams Delays to MTA Workers’ Comp Payouts” (July 2025)
• TWU Local 100 — “Union Leadership Managing MTA Money Mess” (July 2025)
• The Chief Leader — “MTA blames vendor transition for workers comp payment delays” (2025)
• APFA — Injury on Duty (IOD) resources
• JetBlue — Crewmember Leaves of Absence guide (October 2025)
• Change.org — “Demand Delta Air Lines replace Sedgwick for handling claims”
• Afar — “Why Flight Attendants Don’t Help You with Your Bags”
• Matador Network — “Why Flight Attendants Won’t Lift Your Luggage Into the Overhead Bin for You” (citing the Los Angeles Times)
• Landau Injury Law — “Are Flight Attendants Legally Prohibited from Lifting Heavy Carry-On Bags?” (December 2025)
• WorkersCompensation.com — “$18 Million for Bad Clothes? American Airlines Flight Attendants win ‘Toxic Uniform’ Lawsuit” (July 2025)
• Aviation A2Z — “10 Years After Uniform Health Complaints Rocked American Airlines, Employees Lose Major Court Battle” (June 2026)
• World Socialist Web Site — “US flight attendants speak out over uniforms that cause illness” (June 2019)
• AFA-CWA — “Toxic Uniforms Present Health Hazard for Flight Attendants” (May 2018)
• Alaska Airlines — “Alaska Airlines introduces a new uniform designed to top safety standards” (January 2020)
• Transport Workers Union — “JetBlue Pilot Wins Major Worker Compensation for Toxic Fume Exposure” (August 2020)
• CWA — “Cabin Air Safety Act of 2019” summary
• AFA-CWA — “As Airplane Safety Concerns Rise, Congressman Frost Introduces Bipartisan ‘Safe Air on Airplanes Act'” (January 2026)
• Los Angeles Times via Government Technology — “Congress Bill Addresses Overlooked Toxic Fumes on Airplanes” (2022)
• Los Angeles Times via Stars and Stripes — “Toxic fumes on board airplanes? Airlines finally might have to do something about it” (March 2023)
• OSHA news release — “Investigation finds American Airlines retaliated against flight attendants who reported worker illnesses caused by fumes in aircraft cabins” (January 4, 2023)
• Associated Press via The Seattle Times — “OSHA: American Airlines retaliated against workers who reported fumes” (January 2023)
• Newsweek — “American Airlines Employee Scoring Sparks Privacy Concerns in California” (July 2026)
• Aviation A2Z — “American Airlines Accused of Monitoring Staff for a Year Before Revealing New Performance App” (July 2026)