United Airlines flight attendants vote to authorize strike: Will it impact travel?
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(NEW YORK) — United Airlines flight attendants, represented by the Association of Flight Attendants, moved closer to a strike Wednesday after the union announced that 99.99% of service members voted in favor of strike authorization.
The vote included 90% of the United Airlines flight attendant staff.
Among the strike requests, flight attendants are demanding significant double-digit base pay increases, being compensated for time at work outside of flights, schedule flexibility and work rule improvements, job security, retirement and more, according to the union.
The historic vote marked the first time in 20 years that United flight attendants have authorized a strike, since the airline’s 2005 bankruptcy negotiations.
However, a strike will not occur immediately and despite the vote, there will be no immediate disruptions to airline operations.
Experts say it’s highly unlikely United flight attendants will actually walk off the job. There are a number of steps that must happen before a strike can take place and the president and Congress have the power to stall or stop an airline strike.
“To be clear, there is no work stoppage or labor disruption,” United told ABC News in a statement Wednesday. “Off-duty flight attendants are simply exercising their right to conduct an informational picket.”
The results of the strike authorization vote were announced as nearly 20 informational picket lines were seen at airports across the country.
“We deserve an industry-leading contract. Our strike vote shows we’re ready to do whatever it takes to reach the contract we deserve,” Ken Diaz, president of the United chapter of the Association of Flight Attendants, said in a statement Wednesday.
“We are the face of United Airlines and planes don’t take off without us. As Labor Day travel begins, United management is reminded what’s at stake if we don’t get this done,” he added.
After this week, the union walked away from federally mandated negotiations. The union will now ask the National Mediation Board to release them into a 30-day “cooling-off” period, which would set a potential strike deadline.
“The United management team gives themselves massive compensation increases while Flight Attendants struggle to pay basic bills,” Diaz continued. “The 99.99% yes vote is a clear reminder that we are unified in the fight against corporate greed and ready to fight for our fair share of the profits we create.”
Similar strike authorization votes have been cast at competing airlines including American, Alaska, Southwest, and more.
A Jaguar I-Pace autonomous vehicle from Waymo is seen pulling over to collect a passenger, Aug. 1, 2024, in Los Angeles. — Alex Stone/ABC News
(LOS ANGELES) — Waymo, the self-driving car division of Alphabet, first began offering its autonomous rideshare service on the streets of San Francisco earlier this year. Now the company is expanding, recently launching in Los Angeles.
Waymo’s electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs operate as taxis, except there’s nobody in the driver’s seat. Using cameras, sensors and even microphones, it ferries riders to their destinations – if all goes according to plan – just as a human driver would.
“There is nobody behind the driver’s seat at all — in fact, often there’s nobody in the car at all, and it’s driving to pick somebody up,” says Andrew Chatham, senior director of commercialization, scale, and infrastructure at Waymo. He spoke with ABC Audio in LA for a new exhibit at the famed Petersen Automotive Museum highlighting the story of Waymo.
“So we use a variety of sensors on the car. There’s cameras, there’s radars and lidar — which is a laser range finding system. We take all that information, we look 360 degrees around us, multiple times a second, and we drive,” says Chatham.
And Waymo claims driving in one of their cars with the computers doing the work – accelerating, braking, stopping, and changing lanes – is actually safer than driving with a human behind the wheel.
“It’s very clear that it is ready for the streets — we’ve seen from statistics that it is safer than human drivers, so if you’re comfortable with those, you should be pretty comfortable with Waymo,” says Chatham. “Even more comfortable.”
But not everyone is comfortable.
“We’ve heard of these cars shutting down when they lose cell service, traffic being backed up, they don’t know how to maneuver through more, you know, winding roads. Blocking emergency vehicles. And also there’s an aspect of jobs being lost,” says Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez.
“So as far as I can tell, there’s some things where we just have to put our foot down and this is one of them,” he says.
This summer, police in Phoenix, where the company also operates, pulled over a Waymo vehicle for driving into oncoming traffic while trying to navigate around a construction area. That maneuver is why Councilmember Soto-Martinez says he doesn’t want them on his streets.
“We are elected to provide safety, to deal with transportation issues, and so many other things for our residents, that’s what we are voted for,” says Soto-Martinez.
Waymo said the incident in Phoenix happened due to “inconsistent construction signage.”
But like it or not, self-driving cars are the future, according to Rahul Jain, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in electrical and computer engineering and works with Google.
“This is really inevitable, it’s going to happen,” says Jain, though he adds that wide-scale adoption of self-driving technology is likely a long way off.
“Twenty years might be the right timespan, when we see this technology reduce in cost enough, and also advanced sufficiently that it will be in passenger vehicles that people can buy,” he says.
Even still, Jain says the technology is currently safe for passengers, so much so that the next step for autonomous vehicle companies could be removing the vehicle’s steering wheel.
“There’s definitely going to be some transition as this technology evolves, you know, then it will be awhile before people become comfortable, and then we can feel comfortable with the steering wheel also missing. But I don’t think we’re there yet,” says Jain.
Chatham says, in general, his company’s technology is always learning. Already, the cars know to pull over when they detect the sound of a siren or flashing emergency lights. Next, he says, Waymo is tackling how autonomous vehicles behave in inclement weather conditions.
“Sure, on the map the lane is over here, but according to how everybody else is driving and where the divots are in the snow, it looks like the lane is really over here,” says Chatham. “And that’s something that the car starts to reason about and it’s getting more intelligent with AI about exactly where we want to drive to be like a human.”
But Councilmember Soto-Martinez has another issue: driverless taxis could mean a human is out of a job.
“It’s definitely taking jobs right now. I mean, there are autonomous vehicles driving folks around with the many issues,” he says. “In my community, those jobs are often done by people who just arrived in this country. … If that’s going to be outsourced to an autonomous vehicle that is gonna cause all these safety concerns, I have big issues with that.”
Jain says history would show technology always takes jobs, and that jobs change over time.
“Eventually there is some adjustment in the labor market. People find other kinds of jobs, and start to do more interesting jobs than I guess, driving cars around,” says Jain.
Chatham says while nobody is driving the cars, plenty of people are working at Waymo.
“Waymo’s provided a lot of jobs. We’ve do use several human beings to run the service, we have people operating the depots, we have people working in desk-based jobs. I’m employed by Waymo,” says Chatham.
“And I think it’s also easy to forget that people spend a lot of their time just sitting in traffic, beholden to the steering wheel that they’re sitting behind. And they can free up that time, and make people productive. That is time back in people’s lives,” he adds.
Waymo is already looking at what their next vehicle will look like, a custom built van-like vehicle designed by a Chinese firm called Zeekr.
“The base vehicle is really built as a versatile platform. This is really a vehicle that’s built to be a high thru-put taxi service. It’s very comfortable,” says Chatham.
Listen to this story and more on ABC Audio’s new special, On The Move:
(NEW YORK) — The Federal Reserve is set to make a pivotal decision about its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday that could dial back its years-long fight against inflation.
Investors widely expect the Fed to cut interest rates for the first time since 2020, delivering long-sought relief for consumers saddled by high borrowing costs for everything from credit cards to mortgages.
“The time has come for policy to adjust,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last month at an annual gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “The direction of travel is clear.”
Inflation has slowed dramatically from a peak of about 9% in 2022, though it remains slightly higher than the Fed’s target of 2%.
Meanwhile, the job market has cooled. A weaker-than-expected jobs report in each of the last two months has stoked concern among some economists.
In theory, lower interest rates help stimulate economic activity and boost employment; higher interest rates slow economic performance and ease inflation.
“We will do everything we can to support a strong labor market as we make further progress toward price stability,” Powell said last month.
The chances of an interest rate cut at the Fed’s meeting on Wednesday are all but certain, according to the CME FedWatch Tool, a measure of market sentiment.
Market observers are divided over whether the Fed will impose its typical cut of a quarter of a percentage point, or opt for a larger half-point cut. The tool estimates the probability of a half-point cut at 65% and the odds of a quarter-point cut at 35%.
A half-point cut risks overstimulating the economy and rekindling elevated inflation, while a quarter-point cut threatens to delay the type of economic jumpstart that may be required to avert a recession, Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, told ABC News in a statement.
“Rarely have market expectations been so torn” on the eve of a rate decision, Shah added.
Regardless of the size of the rate cut, borrowers should not expect immediate relief, Elizabeth Renter, senior economist at NerdWallet, told ABC News in a statement.
“This initial rate cut will have little immediate impact,” Renter said. “I anticipate many consumers and business owners will take the beginning of this change in monetary policy as a sign of hope.”
The expected rate cut on Wednesday would go into effect less than 50 days before the November election.
The Fed says it bases its decisions on economic conditions and operates as an independent government body.
When asked about the 2024 election at a press conference in Washington, D.C., in December, Powell said, “We don’t think about politics.”
Downed trees on a home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Sept.r 29, 2024, in Rutherfordton, N.C. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Helene flooded properties and devastated buildings in recent days as it tore across a vast stretch from Florida to Tennessee.
Over the coming days and weeks, households will start to rebuild — and the costs will be enormous. Some homeowners will struggle to afford it.
The devastation arrives after years of skyrocketing prices for home and flood insurance that have left some households without coverage and others choosing low-cost plans with weaker policies, experts told ABC News. The increase owes in part to a surge in costs for building materials as well as the risk of more frequent or intense storms posed by climate change, they said.
Homeowners at properties damaged by Helene are likely to see their insurance costs rise even further, imposing financial strain for years to come, the experts added.
“There’s no question that the burden on households’ budgets has increased in recent years,” Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told ABC News. “It has gotten substantially more expensive to live in harm’s way.”
Helene, which made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region Thursday night as a Category 4 hurricane, was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the Big Bend on record.
More than 100 people have been killed by Helene.
Helene dumped more than 30 inches of rain on North Carolina, producing the biggest local flooding in recorded history. The path of the storm’s devastation has spanned more than 600 miles.
Homeowners are set to draw on insurance policies that have become much more expensive in recent years.
In 2023, the nationwide average premium for owner-occupied homeowners insurance climbed about 11%, rising three times more than the overall inflation rate, S&P Global found in January.
Beginning a few years earlier, insurance prices soared even higher for homeowners in the region impacted by Helene. In Florida, the average home insurance price jumped a staggering 43% from January 2018 to December 2023, S&P Global said. Over that same period, the average insurance price for homeowners increased about 36% in North Carolina.
Rising prices leave customers less likely to purchase strong plans with ample benefits in the event of a disaster, Shan Ge, a professor at New York University who studies insurance and climate change, told ABC News.
“With the costs going up, people are getting less insurance and that’s going to be a problem when a disaster like this hits,” Ge said. “The recovery will be slower and the financial effects will be bigger.”
Homeowners insurance sometimes includes separate hurricane insurance, which typically involves an additional deductible paid by the consumer for damage incurred by a hurricane.
Neither homeowners insurance nor hurricane insurance covers flood damage, however. Instead, consumers must purchase flood insurance, but a far lower share of homeowners enrolls in flood coverage than home insurance.
The damage caused by Helene could expose the difficulties caused by that relatively low enrollment rate in flood insurance, Jeff Waters, an analyst at Moody’s Analytics subsidiary RMS, told ABC News.
“With an event like Helene where we are seeing all of the water, there’s likely to be more uninsured losses happening due to water because you don’t have as much take up there as you would on the hurricane policy side of things,” Waters said.
The price of flood insurance has also increased in recent years, and it’s expected to rise at a faster rate for some households going forward as the National Flood Insurance Program puts in place what it has called “Risk Rating 2.0.”
The new approach will set the price of flood insurance based on a calculation of each home’s risk of flooding, altering a previous policy that examined whether a home belonged to a general at-risk area.
Some homes damaged by Helene will face a price crunch as they weather an increase in flood insurance costs, alongside the anticipated increase in homeowners insurance that typically follows a hurricane, some experts said.
“It’s pretty clear in the aftermath of these disasters that homeowners insurance premiums rise a lot,” Ishita Sen, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School who studies home insurance rates, told ABC News.
The prospect of higher insurance costs could prompt difficult choices for homeowners and their communities, said Keys.
“This higher cost of living in disaster-prone areas is hitting households’ pocket books in ways that we haven’t seen,” Keys said. “Eventually it’ll induce substantial chances in these communities, whether that’s deciding where to live or how to build.”
