Overview
Delta remains the largest non-represented flight-attendant target in the United States. The public record shows that the effort to organize Delta flight attendants is not new and cannot be described as a one-cycle campaign. Instead, it appears in distinct episodes stretching from 2001 through the post-merger period and into the current coalition campaign. What the public record still does not provide is a clean, defensible Delta-specific organizing budget.
That makes Delta important for two reasons. First, it is a major organizing target in its own right. Second, it is a useful disclosure case study: large-scale organizing activity can be visible publicly without producing a carrier-specific line item that allows outside readers to say with confidence that “Delta cost the union $X.”
Verifiable history
The earliest clear public marker in the reviewed material is an August 2001 NMB weekly activity report listing a new AFA application at Delta Air Lines for flight attendants. Because that episode predates the 2004 merger with CWA, the historical label there is AFA rather than CWA-AFA. That 2001 filing is important because it shows that Delta flight-attendant organizing was present in the public regulatory record years before the later Delta–Northwest integration fight.
The next major cycle came in 2009–2011. Public reporting and the regulatory record together show a filing-and-withdrawal period tied to then-pending voting-rule changes, followed by the 2010 election loss and then interference allegations that did not overturn the result. In practical terms, the 2009–2011 campaign produced a full public cycle: filing, withdrawal and refiling under changed rules, election, dismissal, interference allegations, and final rejection of the challenge.
The current-era campaign begins cleanly in late 2019. By 2024 and 2025, the campaign was also operating in a broader Delta coalition environment, with public reporting describing simultaneous organizing efforts among flight attendants, technicians, and ramp, cargo, and tower workers.
What the LM-2 can show publicly
The national CWA-AFA LM-2 does not show a Delta-specific campaign budget. It does, however, show the scale of national representational spending and the basic funding architecture. CWA-AFA national headquarters reported representational-activities spending of $16.78 million in FY2023, $19.49 million in FY2024, and $19.85 million in FY2025. In the same years, it reported total membership of 45,500, 49,452, and 50,362. On Statement B line 36, it reported $0 for dues and agency fees in all three years, while reporting Other Receipts of $24.27 million, $28.11 million, and $28.88 million.
That architecture matters. It means the sector filing is not functioning like a simple carrier-by-carrier dues ledger. Instead, the public record shows a sector-level funding base, with money visible through Schedule 14 and other schedules, not a public table that says “United = X members = Y dollars” or “Delta campaign = $Z.”
The filing also shows some Delta-adjacent entries and campaign-adjacent items, but those should not be overstated. Public snippets show Delta-related payee entries and Atlanta-related campaign context, but the filing language alone does not justify converting those items into a defensible total for Delta flight-attendant organizing.
How the parent and sector filings fit together
The parent CWA LM-2 reports total dues-and-agency-fee receipts of $117.76 million in FY2023, $124.22 million in FY2024, and $128.51 million in FY2025, with total membership of 648,305, 663,346, and 682,324. The sector filing then shows a large visible funding stream from CWA into CWA-AFA through Schedule 14. Read together, the two filings show a national-to-sector financial architecture, but not a carrier-specific remittance table.
The latest publicly located United MEC LM-2 is the 05/31/2024 filing, which reports 25,692 members. Against the CWA-AFA sector’s 50,362 members in the 05/31/2025 national filing, that suggests a provisional United share of just over half of total sector membership. That is useful scale context, but it remains a cross-year estimate methodology rather than a directly reported United-to-sector remittance figure.
In other words: the public filings support a reasonable estimate of United’s share of the sector funding base, but they do not directly report “United flight attendants paid $X into CWA-AFA national headquarters.”
What cannot be estimated
No precise current Delta campaign-cost total is publicly supportable from non-union public sources alone. It can be established that the campaign exists, that it has been active for years, that it intensified again in the post-2019 period, and that organizing-related spending must be disclosed somewhere in the filing architecture. But the public record still does not permit a defensible statement like “the current Delta campaign cost $X.”
Bottom line
CWA-AFA’s Delta flight-attendant campaign is real, long-running, and plainly resource-consuming. The strongest public conclusion, however, remains narrower than a dollar figure. The current reporting framework can prove that substantial organizing and representational spending exists and can show a large sector funding base, but it does not appear to isolate a precise Delta-specific campaign total.
That makes Delta a strong case study not only in organizing history, but also in disclosure limits. For readers trying to follow dues-supported spending into a non-represented-property campaign, the public trail is visible enough to establish activity, but not clean enough to provide a final campaign ledger.