Hundreds of former international flight attendants accuse United Airlines of discrimination

Until last year, Stuart was a man with ties to many countries—an exemplar of this multinational age of business. He was a Briton who’d lived since 1996 in Japan, working as a flight attendant on international flights. His employer through all those years, United Airlines, was American.

Stuart worked under a US contract, which meant that he was represented by a US union, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA). He paid US income taxes and contributed to social security. After the Covid-19 pandemic hit, he even continued getting his salary under the US government’s payroll support program, which disbursed $40 billion to US airlines on the condition that they didn’t lay off employees until Sep. 30, 2020.

But as soon as that deadline lapsed, Stuart lost his job; so did 535 other flight attendants who were not US citizens but were on US contracts in United’s international bases in Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong. They didn’t get any offers to relocate or to be furloughed, as they had during past crises. But their American colleagues, on the same contracts in the same bases, didn’t suffer the same fate. Of Stuart’s 430 or so colleagues in Tokyo, he says, around 60 were US citizens, and United offered to accommodate them in its bases back home.

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