We'll Take the $3. We Still Want a Real Contract.
Management's Nov. 10 email promised a raise, a one-time payout and more time on Boarding Pay. Here's what the numbers say.
Let's say this first: SkyWest Flight Attendants are glad for the money. We love this company because of the people in it, and we want it to be even better. That's why we ran the numbers, and every SkyWest Flight Attendant should see what we found.
On Nov. 10, Inflight management emailed SkyWest Flight Attendants about three things. A pay scale increase starting Jan. 1. A one-time productivity payout of $3 for every credit hour flown between Oct. 1, 2025, and Sept. 30, 2026. And extensions on Boarding Pay and a few other items through the end of 2027. The payout lands Nov. 24, and we'll spend ours on rent and Christmas, same as everyone else.
What the payout is worth next to what we earned
Management's own pay chart assumes a Flight Attendant flies 900 credit hours a year. At $3 an hour, that's about $2,700 before taxes, paid once. Your number depends on your own hours: fly 700 and it's closer to $2,100, fly 1,100 and it's closer to $3,300. At SkyWest's profit rate over that same year, the company earned $2,700 about every three and a half minutes.
Management's own website says there are more than 5,000 of us. If the average is close to 900 hours, the whole payout costs SkyWest about $13.5 million.
Over those same twelve months, SkyWest, Inc. reported about $413 million in net income: $91 million in the last quarter of 2025, plus $322 million in the first nine months of 2026. Our payout is about 3% of that. Put another way, it's less than two weeks of profit.
Now look at where the money went instead. SkyWest spent $75 million buying back its own stock in each of the first three quarters of this year. That's $225 million, about seventeen times what every SkyWest Flight Attendant is getting combined. In July, the board approved another $250 million for buybacks.
Here's how a buyback works, in plain terms. SkyWest takes profit SkyWest Flight Attendants help earn and uses it to buy its own shares off the market. With fewer shares out there, each one tends to be worth more. And who owns a lot of those shares? Top executives. Less than a week after the board approved that extra $250 million, SkyWest's chief financial officer sold 25,000 of his own shares for about $2.8 million. Our work lifts the stock price, and management cashes out. For more on how management finds money for buybacks and executive stock sales while telling us there's no budget, read Flight Facts.
This next one surprised us. This summer, with a stroke of the pen, SkyWest changed how long it says its E175 jets will last, from 22 years to 30. Nothing about the airplanes changed. On paper, that one change earned SkyWest $18.5 million in three months.
With one stroke of the pen, SkyWest made more money appear out of thin air than our entire payout.
Read past the headline
The payout doesn't count holiday pay, vacation, jury duty or bereavement. If you lost a parent this year and took emergency leave, those hours came off your check. Served on a jury? Same thing.
Then there's Boarding Pay. Management's email says the new scale is "positioned at the top of the regional industry across every year of service," and Boarding Pay does a lot of the lifting on that chart. But Boarding Pay is a Temporary Resolution. So are New Hire Training Compensation, Line Holder Displacement and Stand-Alone Ready Reserve. So is the uniform allotment. Every one of them now runs out Dec. 31, 2027, unless management says otherwise. Without a contract, keeping them comes down to management's "generosity."
Management's Stronger Together site brags that SkyWest brought in regional boarding pay first, in 2023. Look at the timing: SkyWest Flight Attendants were organizing with AFA. Boarding Pay was a move against our union campaign, and with weak work rules, no way to enforce anything and no union watching, management can quietly claw the cost back somewhere else. GoJet's AFA Flight Attendants now get boarding pay at the same rate, half an hour of pay per boarding, and theirs is written into a contract. Three years in, ours is still a Temporary Resolution that management can renew or let lapse.
And the email never says how big the scale increase actually is. No percentage. You have to log in to find out.
The headline number shifts, too. The chart in the email says SkyWest pays "16% higher on average." The Stronger Together site says 15%. When management keeps the books, draws the chart and picks which airlines go on it, it's fair to ask how the number was built.
Who's really setting the bar
Read the footnote under management's chart. It promises SkyWest will stay on top even after the 2027 raises at Endeavor, CommuteAir and GoJet take effect. Endeavor and GoJet Flight Attendants are AFA. Their raises are written into contracts they voted on.
So Flight Attendants with contracts set the pace, and SkyWest management moves just enough to stay ahead on a chart. Union contracts don't block raises like this one, either. In 2022, Flight Attendants at Envoy, Piedmont and PSA won improvements in the middle of their AFA contracts.
With a union, we stop chasing the bar and start setting it.
That's a big part of why management cares so much about this campaign. SkyWest is the largest regional airline in the country, and SkyWest Flight Attendants are the largest regional Flight Attendant group. With a union, we stop chasing the bar and start setting it, for ourselves and for every regional Flight Attendant in the industry. Keeping SkyWest Flight Attendants out of that effort is worth far more to management than a $3 payout.
Bargaining language, borrowed
The email opens with "SkyWest and SIA have agreed" and later says the two "worked together ahead of our amendable date." That's bargaining language, borrowed to dress SIA up as a union. SIA is funded by SkyWest, and SIA's own handbook says so. There's no second side at that table. Management decides what gets talked about and when, and it can rewrite the policy manual whenever it wants, so an "amendable date" on a document management controls doesn't protect anyone. Nothing in this announcement is something SkyWest Flight Attendants can enforce. If it disappears in 2028, there's no one to call.
The Stronger Together site goes further. It calls management's paperwork with SIA a "legally binding" "CBA" that has been "upheld multiple times in court." But SkyWest has only ever used that paperwork in court to defend the company. It has never once helped a Flight Attendant there. A real contract works differently. It's negotiated by an independent union that Flight Attendants run and pay for, and Flight Attendants can enforce it. SIA is funded by SkyWest. Calling the policy manual a "CBA" doesn't make it a contract, and if it were one, Boarding Pay wouldn't need a new expiration date every couple of years. The full court record is in Upheld in Court, Against Us.
Then look at the timing. This arrived while SkyWest Flight Attendants are organizing. Improvements that arrive during a union drive are common across the industry. They're welcome, and they're also meant to make people stop asking for something better.
- Management writes it and can change it any time
- Boarding Pay expires Dec. 31, 2027
- Nothing Flight Attendants can enforce
- Changes only with a Flight Attendant vote
- Raises and Boarding Pay locked in
- AFA's own legal department to enforce it
What a contract changes
With a contract, a raise like this gets locked in. Boarding Pay stops being temporary. SkyWest Flight Attendants decide as a group what matters most, whether that's pay, reserve rules, healthcare or working for multiple mainline partners in one trip, and we vote on the deal. When management breaks it, we have AFA's own legal department to back us up.
So yes, we'll take the $3. Every SkyWest Flight Attendant earned it. We'd just rather stop waiting for the next email to find out what we're allowed to have.
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Where these numbers come from: SkyWest, Inc. quarterly results for Q4 2025 through Q3 2026, its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026, management's Nov. 10, 2026, email and pay chart, management's Stronger Together SkyWest Flight Attendants page, the GoJet AFA contract, and the CFO's July 2026 SEC filing on his stock sale. This piece was prepared with all available information, and corrections are welcome at timetofly@ooitstime.com.
