Air NZ cabin crew lose fight for free hotel breakfasts
Saturday, 3 August 2024
A union representing more than 800 Air New Zealand cabin crew says the airline breached an agreement by failing to provide free hotel breakfasts.
The union said the airline had also tried to undermine it by providing free breakfasts to cabin crew who belonged to another union.
The Employment Relations Authority agreed with Air New Zealand that it made no such promise and that it had not breached the agreement.
Air New Zealand cabin crew have lost a dispute with the airline over free hotel breakfasts.
Cabin crew represented by the Flight Attendants Association of New Zealand (FAA) said a clause in their Strategic Partnership Memorandum of Understanding (SPMoU), agreed with Air NZ in 2020, required the airline to pay for a free breakfast for its members staying at hotels while on duty overseas as cabin crew on the airline’s wide-body B787 and B777 aircraft.
They said Air NZ had breached the agreement by only providing free breakfasts at some hotels.
They also said the company had breached the agreement by providing free breakfasts to cabin crew who were members of another union, E tū, and by refusing to provide free breakfasts in hotels at new destinations added to Air NZ routes.
FAA was formed during Covid-19 by cabin crew dissatisfied with their existing union, E tū, and how redundancies resulting from the pandemic were decided and applied to different groups of members. It now has 840 members who fly internationally on Air NZ’s wide-body aircraft, while E tū has about 600 other cabin crew working on those aircraft.
The FAA said that by providing the free breakfasts to E tū members the company had tried to undermine its collective bargaining.
Air NZ denied there was any term of employment saying it must provide free breakfasts, and that it had complied with the agreement, which required it to “do its best” to get overseas hotels to provide FAA members with free breakfasts at no cost to itself or the cabin crew.
The company said it decided to provide free breakfasts, where it could, to all cabin crew regardless of union membership, “as a matter of fair treatment between all Air NZ flight attendants”.
It also said it had decided no free breakfasts would be provided at any new hotel locations because it had discovered that the company was being charged an additional cost for breakfasts at some of the existing locations.
It agreed to keep providing free breakfasts, at its cost, at ten existing locations while a review of its allowance structure was carried out.
The FAA was unhappy with the company’s response and went to the Employment Relations Authority to resolve the dispute.
At a hearing in May, authority member Robin Arthur heard from cabin crew that FAA wanted free hotel during stopovers because it would leave more of their daily expenses allowance to pay for better lunches and dinners.
Cabin crew told Arthur that Air NZ representatives assured FAA that the free breakfasts would only be provided to its members, not all flight attendants and, specifically, not to those who were E tū members. This was to be an acknowledgement to FAA members for their cooperation in agreeing to more flexible working conditions than those E tū had negotiated.
The free breakfasts for E tū members were provided from December 2022 after E tū provided Air NZ with a copy of draft legal proceedings alleging discrimination on the grounds of union membership.
It was around this time that Air NZ told the FAA that a review had discovered the free breakfasts for FAA members was costing the company between $25 and $60 per crew member, with an annual cost of around $1m, and that this cost would increase with an increased frequency of flights.
Arthur said the SPMoU was not a collective agreement, meaning it was not an employment agreement as defined in the Employment Relations Act.
“While a FAA member might have a legitimate expectation that they would receive the benefit of a favourable term in that agreement (the SPMoU) between their union and Air NZ, such a benefit was not an additional, individual term of employment,” Arthur said.
He said the SPMoU about free breakfasts didn’t provide a commitment or guarantee FAA members would be provided with a free breakfast at all hotels they stayed in while away on a tour of duty or that, where a free breakfast was provided, it would be exclusively available to FAA members and not to any other Air NZ flight attendants.
Arthur also said the agreement’s inclusion of the word “intends” was important because it showed Air NZ’s “commitment of endeavour, not a guarantee of a particular outcome in every case”.
He noted the FAA and Air NZ had differing views on what had been agreed and said he found the recollection by airline representatives more likely to be correct.
“The airline faced significant financial risks at the time. Its survival depended on substantial loans provided by the government. Large scale layoffs of staff were underway. It was highly unlikely Air NZ representatives would have agreed to increase costs by a commitment to spend more on cabin crew meals,” he said.
Arthur also found that Air NZ had not acted in bad faith by providing free breakfasts to E tū members.
He declined FAA’s application for a finding that Air NZ had breached commitments made in the SPMoU or failed to act in good faith in addressing concerns that arose.