Starting today, and until further notice, United Airlines requires a doctor’s note from any flight attendant calling in sick from duty on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. They note that sick calls have increased over summer weekends by as much as 23% and they believe cabin crew are misusing their sick time.
This comes as flight attendants at the airline are preparing for a strike authorization vote as protracted contract negotiations drag on, and as the carrier has struggled to recover (though not as badly as Delta!) from the CrowdStrike outage.
According to flight attendants union AFA, Section 13.C.4 of their contract outlines the period where United can require an ‘absence certificate’ from flight attendations – July 4 and Christmas holiday periods – and not weekends. They also believe the timing requirement for submitting the absence certificate differs from what’s in their contract (Section 13.C.3).
The union will file a grievance. That, too, can be a protracted process. Any flight attendant affected by the policy can keep records and may eventually be made whole if an improper policy disadvantages them. But the company can impose the policy in the meantime, and there’s risk in non-compliance. This may be enough to scare flight attendants into not calling out when they’re unable to get a doctor’s note – or when they’re sick but the added time and inconvenience of getting a doctor’s note is too burdensome.
Put another way, it may reduce absenteeism (some of which may be related to a preference not to work over the weekend during the summer, or to overall contract negotiations). It may also cause flight attendants to work sick, making other cabin crew and passengers sick. For an airline that emphasized Covid vaccinations as a mandatory job requirement even before the federal government sought to impose this to keep the virus from spreading to other employees this is an odd result.