Upheld in Court, Against Us
SkyWest's website says its "contracts" have been upheld by judges. It leaves out who they were used against.
In court, the policy SkyWest calls a "CBA" has protected exactly one party: SkyWest. That worked for a while. Then judges started looking closer, and they saw it for what it is.
Around Halloween, management sent out a holiday-themed email promising "No Tricks, just: Legally Enforceable Contracts (CBAs)." It pointed to a website with a Myth vs. Fact page, and one claim does all the work there. It shows up three times: SkyWest's CBAs "have been upheld multiple times by courts as legal and binding contracts."
"Upheld multiple times by courts" is true, and here is what it means. Every time that policy has been in front of a judge, SkyWest was using it against Flight Attendants and other employees who had sued for their wages. It has never once been used to defend one of us.
And it is not a contract. What management calls a CBA is not a collective bargaining agreement. Nothing in it was bargained. It is a policy manual SkyWest writes, changes at its own discretion, and has an in-house group sign. In this story we call it what it is: the SIA policy. The quotation marks around "CBA" are management's word, not ours.
Upheld against Flight Attendants
In 2007, two California-based SkyWest Flight Attendants took the company to court. They wanted to be paid for the hours they worked when the aircraft wasn't moving: boarding, delays, sits between flights. They wanted their meal and rest breaks. They wanted overtime. Ordinary wage claims, the kind you file when the company won't fix it any other way.
SkyWest's answer was the SIA policy. The company told the judge that our policy manual "has all the attributes of a collective bargaining agreement," that SIA speaks for us the way a union would, and that because of that, the law required the case to be thrown out and sent back into the company's own grievance process. The Flight Attendants said the obvious: SkyWest isn't a union airline, so there's no union contract. The judge called that argument "without merit," took SkyWest's word about SIA, threw out every claim, and ordered the two Flight Attendants to pay SkyWest's legal costs. Nobody asked whether any of us ever voted for SIA, whether the federal government ever recognized it, or who pays its bills.
The next year a customer service agent in San Diego sued over unpaid wages and breaks. Same answer, using the in-house agents' group. Most of her claims were thrown out too.
Those are the "multiple times." Two cases. In both, a SkyWest employee asked a judge for wages, and in both, the company held up its in-house policy to make the case go away. That's what SkyWest's view of "legally enforceable" really means: enforceable by SkyWest, against us, to keep us out of court.
Then the courts looked closer
Management's page stops the story in 2008. Here's the rest of it.
In 2016, Illinois-based Flight Attendants sued SkyWest for unpaid time, and the company reached for the same answer. This time the Flight Attendants came prepared. They showed the judge that the manual has no neutral third party in it anywhere. No mediation, no arbitration, no cooling-off period. SkyWest's own policy says SIA's job is to give "input," and grievances are decided by management, period. Judge John Tharp of the federal court in Chicago didn't buy the defense. Minimum wage is a right every worker has under the law, and a company can't make it disappear by pointing at a manual.
In 2018, a ramp agent at SFO sued on behalf of his coworkers under California wage law. SkyWest said six of his seven claims couldn't be heard because of its in-house policy for the agents' group. Judge James Donato in San Francisco refused to assume that policy was a real CBA and told the company to prove it. SkyWest never did. The case went forward for the whole group, and in 2022 the company paid $4.2 million to settle.
In 2023, California and Washington Flight Attendants were back in front of Judge Tharp over overtime. SkyWest filed a sworn statement from SIA's president and pointed to the 2007 case as if it settled everything. The judge set the statement aside, read the manual himself, and found nothing in it showing that Flight Attendants ever picked SIA to speak for them or that a majority of us ever agreed to it. The 2007 ruling, he said, proved nothing about the years since. The case went forward.
So the full record reads like this. Two courts, in 2007 and 2008, took SkyWest's word that SIA is a union. Three federal judges since then, in 2016, 2018 and 2023, wouldn't. The last one to look closely couldn't find evidence that Flight Attendants ever chose SIA to speak for them. None of that is on the speedometer.
Never once used for us
One more thing you won't find on the Myth vs. Fact page: a single case where the SIA policy helped a Flight Attendant in court. There isn't one. It has only ever been used against us. And there's no neutral arbitrator who can make the company honor it, because the grievance process the page calls "fair and consistent" ends at a manager's desk.
A "contract" only one side can enforce isn't a contract. It's a policy manual with a signature page.
Contracts get better. Manuals wait for management.
Management's page also claims that union contracts lock Flight Attendants in for years with no way to improve them. Tell that to the Flight Attendants at Envoy, Piedmont and PSA, American's three wholly owned regionals, who negotiated mid-contract improvements with AFA in 2022 while their contracts were still in force: starting pay raised above $27 an hour, retention bonuses of up to $3,000, paid summer reliability bonuses, and company-paid commuter hotel rooms, including rooms in base for commuters picking up extra flying. A union contract sets a floor. It does not stop both sides from raising it, and when they do, the raise is in writing, signed, and ours to keep. And notice what happens next: SkyWest management watches every one of those union gains and copies just enough of them to stay competitive. The improvements we do get were won somewhere else, by Flight Attendants with a contract, and handed to us on management's schedule. We've been riding on their contracts for years. It's time we had our own.
Why they work this hard
SkyWest Flight Attendants are the largest regional Flight Attendant group in the country, and the largest without a union. That's not a coincidence. It's the business. We fly under the United, Delta, American and Alaska brands so those airlines can carry the same passengers for less money, and the easiest place to save money is the cabin. Lower pay, thinner work rules, a grievance process that ends with the boss. The model only works if the people in the cabin can't change it, and a real contract would let us.
The regional model has to change too
We've had to change. Rent went up, groceries went up, and we've been asked to do more with less on every trip. The regional model hasn't changed in decades, and management has treated that as a law of nature instead of a choice. It isn't. A contract we can enforce gives us the power to raise the bar at SkyWest, and when the largest regional Flight Attendant group in the country raises the bar, the whole industry has to follow.
Anti-union is the culture
So keeping a union out isn't a side project at SkyWest. It's part of the culture, and it goes back years. When SkyWest pilots tried to organize in 2007, management banned union lanyards and interfered with the pilots' flyers until a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the company to stop. Flight Attendants get the softer version: a company-colored website, a speedometer, a constant flow of emails, and an in-house group that lets management say the word "union" without having one. None of it is about defending the policy manual. It's about keeping the policy manual, because a manual is something management writes and a contract is something we negotiate and vote on, and only one of those can be used to hold the company to its word.
Who the regional model pays
The model is also very good business for the people at the top. In the first nine months of 2026, SkyWest made $322 million in profit and spent about $225 million of it buying back its own stock. On July 23 the company announced another $250 million for more buybacks. Buybacks push the share price up, and the executives' stock is worth more when the price is higher. On July 28, a few days after the company announced how much money it made that quarter, CEO Chip Childs sold 50,500 of his shares for about $5.7 million. The next day the chief financial officer sold 25,000 shares for about $2.8 million. Both sales are on file with the SEC. None of it is illegal. It's simply the arrangement: the cabin stays cheap, the profit goes to buybacks, the buybacks lift the stock, and the executives cash out.
A contract backed by an arbitrator who doesn't work for SkyWest would move some of that money toward the people working the flights. That's what the Myth vs. Fact page is protecting. It's why management built a whole website around one carefully worded sentence: that its CBAs "have been upheld multiple times by courts." True, as long as nobody asks who they were upheld against.
The fear they count on
Management counts on one fear to keep it that way: if our costs go up, the mainline partners will walk and the flying will disappear. Look at what actually happened the last time a regional's costs went up. In 2022, when pilots were leaving the regionals faster than they could be replaced, pilot pay jumped across the whole regional industry. American's own regionals, Envoy and Piedmont, raised first-year captain pay from $78 to $146 an hour, and the money came from the top. Within months the rest of the regionals followed, SkyWest included. The mainlines did not cancel the flying. They paid for it, because they cannot run their networks without it. Regionals exist for more than cheap labor. They feed the hubs, they fly the routes a mainline jet can't fill, and they are a huge share of every partner's daily departures. The partners need SkyWest to be staffed and reliable far more than they need it to be cheap.
That fear is the one thing management cannot afford to lose. As long as we believe the airline survives only on our backs, we keep carrying it. The pilots at the regionals stopped believing it, and the money appeared.
The Flight Attendants who sued in 2007 lost and were told to pay SkyWest's costs. The ones who sued in 2016 and 2023 made the company prove its claim, and it couldn't. The difference wasn't the law. The difference was that the second group knew what they were looking at. Now you do too. That's why we're organizing with AFA: so the next time a "contract" is held up in court, it's a real one, and we're the ones holding it.
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Court decisions cited: Fitz-Gerald v. SkyWest (Cal. Ct. App. 2007); Blackwell v. SkyWest (S.D. Cal. 2008); Hirst v. SkyWest (N.D. Ill. 2016); Meek v. SkyWest (N.D. Cal. 2018); Tapp v. SkyWest (N.D. Ill. 2023); SkyWest Pilots ALPA Organizing Committee v. SkyWest (N.D. Cal. 2007). Financial figures from SkyWest's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026, its Form 8-K of July 23, 2026, and Forms 4 filed July 30 and 31, 2026.
