Negotiators' newsletter

Management’s Behavior Informs Their Proposal 

This past week’s behavior from management was nothing new; it was familiar. Over the past 23 months the company has shown exactly who they are: a management that drags its feet, dodges engagement, and clings to a cost structure that exploits the very pilots who keep this airline running. What happened this week is a continuation of a deliberate pattern designed to delay meaningful progress while preserving Frontier’s bottom of the industry labor costs. Whether it is scheduling early departure flights on the last day of bargaining, dismissing all proposals with economic implications, or slow-rolling responses, the goal is the same: avoid meaningful progress while keeping Frontier’s structural cost advantages firmly in place. To be clear, at our expense, management enjoys more than a 50% cost advantage, on rates alone, over the rest of the industry. 
 
Management has shown?no interest in modernizing our contract by addressing pilot priorities and making Frontier a career destination. We carried Frontier through COVID, absorbed the strain of explosive growth, and have remained committed despite constant instability. And how does management respond?? By making a proposal that offers less stability, quality of life concessions, and no recognition of our value. 

Management has made one thing crystal clear. They are content to do nothing. They haven’t been able to reach a tentative agreement on any issues?since the fall of 2023. 
 
These are the obstacles management continues to put in the way of meaningful progress. 

• Proposed Hourly Pay Rates that will secure Frontier pilots position as dead last in the industry for the duration of the contract. 

• Stripping away quality of life and flexibility provisions that survived the 2008 bankruptcy, changing the monthly credit override from credit to block and reducing the daily credit for our vacation from 5 hours to 4. 

Management frames the concessions they are seeking as “industry alignment”—but it’s a selective, self-serving version of the industry. They’re quick to embrace cost-cutting provisions and concepts from other contracts, yet they conveniently ignore the very work rules that define quality of life and career sustainability for pilots across the industry. The following are examples of provisions that exist across the industry that management continues to ignore. 

• Industry pay rates, 

• Industry retirement contributions, 

• A Minimum Day Provision (ADG), 

• Hard days off for Reserves, 

• Early release on the last day of Reserve, 

• Industry aligned Cost Sharing on Insurance Benefits, 

• Standard LTD Provisions, and 

• Industry Scope and Job Security Provisions to name just a few. 

This isn’t standardization. It’s exploitation. Management wants to cherry pick cost saving provisions from peer contracts while ignoring the quality-of-life elements that define a true career agreement. It’s a one-sided vision, completely disconnected from how professional pilots are treated across the industry and from what it will take to make Frontier a place pilots chose to spend their careers. 
 
Due diligence demands that the Company’s double standard be made explicit. While management puts forward proposals that would diminish pilot’s quality of life, Frontier’s CEO has continued to extract significant personal gains. Barry Biffle has taken home over $26 million since 2019, more than the CEOs of JetBlue or Spirit when measured relative to company size. In 2023 alone, his compensation amounted to nearly a quarter of one percent of Frontier’s total revenue, a higher share than the CEOs of Delta, JetBlue, or Spirit received. Then management claims it cannot afford competitive pay for pilots, the issue is not economics, it is priorities. The numbers do not merely suggest hypocrisy; they confirm it. Pilots are being asked to accept substandard compensation while executives continue to reward themselves for running the worst operation in the industry. 
 
In our next communication, we’ll take a deeper dive into the company’s economic proposal—specifically how it would impact your life, your family, and your future at Frontier. We’ll show how the proposal isn’t just inadequate, but deliberately structured to divide the pilot group and undervalue those who have committed to making Frontier their career. It’s not just about the numbers—it’s about how management truly views the pilots that work at Frontier.