The pay is abysmal. The American (JFK, FLL, LAX) based FA's wage is the lowest in the industry. After about five years, I had to declare bankruptcy.
Unless you have a trust fund or are incredibly frugal the pittance, you get paid won't cover all the expenses that go with living in one of their US base cities.
They're negotiating a union contract, so hopefully, that might change for the better.
You have zero scheduling flexibility. The roster you get is what you get. Management makes it very difficult to swap trips. You get the privilege of requesting when four of your eight monthly days off are. Just four though, they do what they want with the rest.
The days you aren't off, or on a trip, you are on standby. Standby is 6-8 hours a day, sometimes 5-10 days in a row. Therefore its almost impossible to have a second job as you never know when you are going to be needed to fly. Also, there is no such thing as pay protection. Therefore, if management decides to give the JFK-Amsterdam service (which is a seven day a week service) to London crew, at the last minute, for a month due to a plane being grounded for mechanical, if you happened to have a month of nothing but turns to AMS, your roster is taken away and rep;aced with standby days which, once again, are not compensated. You have no choice but to settle for the $1500 for the month and hope they bless you with a turn or something. It's disgusting.
