The Scorecard Turns: Airline Workers Are Grading Management Now

The next time you fly, a survey will probably show up in your inbox asking how it went. Answer it, and you’re doing more than sharing feedback. At a growing number of airlines, you’re helping write a crew member’s performance score.

American Airlines runs the newest version. It’s called Me@Work, and it launched in April. It gives each of the airline’s roughly 30,000 flight attendants a personal score built from a year of data: passenger surveys, attendance, delays blamed on flight attendants, even how they use Microsoft Teams. American gathered the data quietly for months before anyone knew the program existed. The airline says the scores are just information, not discipline. The flight attendants’ union, APFA, filed a formal dispute. It says crew members are being scored on data they can’t see, check, or challenge.

Now think about what that survey really measures. The number of flight attendants on your flight, the food or lack of it, the WiFi that worked or didn’t, the tight connection: management is supposed to manage all of these things. You lived the result, you scored it, and the score landed on the person who was there to look out for you during your flight.

The scorecard gets turned around

On July 29, APFA launched something called Them@Work. It flips the system: flight attendants now rate the managers above them. The results go straight to management, and the union will publish them.

They aren’t the first. In 2022, United’s flight attendants, through their union AFA, started rating management every week on the same zero-to-ten scale United uses to grade the passenger experience. The first published score: negative 95 percent. So that’s two unions at two of the biggest U.S. airlines building the same tool within four years. This isn’t a one-off thing anymore. It’s a model, and it’s spreading.

What the scores would show

Passengers should want this type of scoring system everywhere, because most of what shapes your flight is hidden behind the PR curtain. Under FAA rules, an airline can legally fly a plane with broken cabin equipment, as long as it’s labeled and logged against internal paperwork you’ll never see. No rule says the airline has to tell you before you buy the seat. The crew member at the door didn’t skip that repair. Your survey may grade them for it anyway.

Or take London this spring. In early March, American suddenly dropped its catering company at Heathrow and started flying all the food across the ocean from the U.S. It never really explained why. Meals got worse in every cabin, on up to 19 flights a day, for almost two months. No one in management ever answered for it. Flight attendants answered for it on every flight, and their union says the extra work lasted even after the food was fixed.

Or what about staffing? This month, American offered up to 1,205 flight attendants, about four percent of its cabin crew, an unpaid month off in September. The leave is voluntary, and plenty of crew members rushed to take it. But why is management wanting to get rid of some crew for a month? American hired more than 2,000 flight attendants in 2026, then cut its fall schedule when its fuel bill jumped by more than $4 billion. The airline could have kept the extra crew as a cushion during volatile summer months; the slack that keeps flights staffed when things go wrong and keeps working crews from being run ragged. It cut the payroll instead. Passengers feel that difference as cancellations.

Make management sweat the number

How glorious a management rating system could be: a standing score at every big company, published on a schedule, promoted with press releases the way companies promote everything else. For it to work, management has to fear it. A bad score should hurt. Getting asked about a bad score during a CNBC interview should hurt more. And a rising score should be something to brag about. A number only changes behavior when the people at the top dread the bad quarter and want the good one.

Customers can feel the negative effects of some management decisions. Fewer crew on board, smaller or no meals on long flights, endless check-in lines. Then a glossy airline email arrives describing the same company you just experienced, and you wonder if you imagined it. You didn’t. The workers know you didn’t.

Ongoing Management Scoring System

This only works where workers have the structure to run it. That’s why both airlines where it launched have strong, long-standing unions. The gap is biggest at Delta, whose flight attendants are the only ones at a major U.S. airline without a union contract. Twenty-nine thousand of them, plus more than 5,000 at SkyWest, are organizing to join AFA-CWA to gain exactly this kind of power. A union is the only structure that can grade management for the public and publish the answer. When workers win the power to document what management does, passengers win it too.

Them@Work’s results are coming. Read them the way you’d read a safety record. Then ask why every company you deal with doesn’t have one. Where no one can answer, the workers are already organizing to change that.

American Airlines flight attendants can rate management by visiting: APFA Them@Work (apfa.org/thematwork)

Disclosure: The author is a former flight attendant. He is also named in a lawsuit connected to the SkyWest flight attendant organizing campaign mentioned in this article.

Sources

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