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Transport Workers Union

Financial Transparency & LM Reporting

International per-capita structure, local flight-attendant funding, and carrier-focused financial disclosures for Southwest, Allegiant, Flight Services International, and JetBlue.

Financial Disclosures

TWU’s finances should be read in two layers. The International books the top-level per-capita and affiliate-transmittal structure, while the flight-attendant groups reviewed here are organized through identifiable locals.

That makes TWU easier to follow than a parent/sector structure like CWA-AFA in one important respect: the public record gives readers named flight-attendant locals rather than a pooled sector body. The most important question is therefore not only what TWU International receives, but how much real financial and representational capacity is visible at the local level.

How the Money Flow Works

TWU International’s LM-2 shows that the International does not book direct dues and agency fees as its principal recurring labor-organization income. In the reviewed filings, the top-level recurring money story is per-capita tax together with funds collected on behalf of affiliates for transmittal to them.

TWU’s FY2025 International LM-2 lists rates of dues and fees as “2 HRS PAY per Month,” but Statement B still shows the International’s recurring receipts dominated by per-capita tax and affiliate-transmittal lines rather than direct dues booked on line 36. Publicly, that makes TWU a clearer International-plus-locals structure than CWA-AFA’s parent/sector split.

TWU International Filings

The International filings are the right place to show TWU’s top-level scale and the degree to which the International acts as a clearing and transmittal layer for affiliates.

The International filings show a clearer top-level pass-through structure than CWA-AFA’s parent/sector split, but the most important member-facing representation still sits at the local level.

TWU Cabin Crew Coalition Structure

TWU’s official cabin-crew structure publicly groups together the flight-attendant locals that matter most for this analysis. That is one reason TWU is comparatively readable in the public record: the carrier groups are tied to identifiable locals rather than submerged inside a pooled national flight-attendant sector.

Southwest Airlines — Local 556

Southwest is the clearest current TWU example of directly visible local flight-attendant funding. Local 556 files its own LM-2 and explicitly identifies its unit as “AIR TRANSPORT SOUTHWEST AIRLINES FLIGHT ATTENDANTS.” For readers comparing benchmark flight-attendant agreements, this is the strongest public TWU example because the same local that negotiates a widely watched contract also files a named flight-attendant annual report.

That matters because the Southwest section can do more than point to a contract headline. It can show the size of the local treasury, the dues rate, the amount spent on representational activity, and the scale of per-capita tax. In public union-governance reporting, that is unusually valuable.

The contract story and the treasury story line up unusually well here. TWU’s 2024 ratification release says Southwest flight attendants became the highest paid in the industry, with a 22.3% raise and $364 million in retroactive wages. At the same time, Local 556’s filings show a large, clearly named flight-attendant local whose representational-activities disbursements ran at roughly half of total receipts in FY2025 and just over half in FY2022 and FY2023, with per-capita tax consuming roughly one-quarter to just under one-third of receipts across those years. That does not by itself prove contract quality, but it does give outside readers a rare audited local-level view of the financial structure behind a benchmark agreement.

Allegiant Air — Local 577

Allegiant flight attendants are represented by Local 577. TWU says Local 577 represents 1,700 Allegiant flight attendants and ratified a new five-year contract in 2024. The official ratification release says the deal locked in immediate wage increases ranging from 20% to 41.2%, with an average wage increase of 25% on ratification and additional quality-of-life gains.

The Allegiant CBA is also helpful because it makes the dues-checkoff path more visible than many public summaries do. The contract provides for payroll deduction of dues, initiation fees, and uniformly applied assessments after signed authorization, and it also contemplates service-charge obligations for non-members under the agreement. In other words, the public contract text shows how money is intended to move from payroll into union funding even though a standalone local annual LM filing has not yet been independently verified in this review.

That makes Allegiant more traceable than a pure organizing-opacity story, but less transparent than Southwest. Local 577 is clearly identifiable, the contract’s dues-checkoff path is public, and TWU International’s reimbursement trail is visible — but the local’s full annual treasury is not yet publicly verified here in the same way Local 556’s is.

Flight Services International — Local 578

Flight Services International flight attendants are represented by Local 578. The local’s public website says the group voted to form a union under TWU on January 11, 2016. TWU’s Spring 2025 magazine says Local 578 represents approximately 400 international flight attendants employed by FSI and contracted to provide cabin crew services to Atlas Air.

This is one of the most unusual groups in the review. The local’s own public materials emphasize that the members are employed by FSI but perform cabin-crew work for Atlas Air, including charter and military-related flying. That makes Local 578 structurally important even though it is not yet the cleanest TWU example financially.

Local 578 is easier to understand structurally than financially. The public record clearly shows its origin, its unusual FSI / Atlas operating model, its approximate size, and its dues structure. What it does not yet give CrewSignal in this review is the same kind of stand-alone local annual filing or clean International-to-local reimbursement trail that would make the money story as direct as Southwest’s.

JetBlue — Local 579

JetBlue flight attendants are represented by Local 579, whose official site identifies the local as “The Union of JetBlue Flight Attendants.” That official local identity matters because it makes JetBlue one of the clearer TWU flight-attendant groups on the representation side even though, as with Allegiant and FSI, the local’s stand-alone annual LM filing has not yet been independently verified in this review.

Local 579’s dues page is especially useful because it tells readers not only the dues amounts, but the local-return structure. The page says that under the TWU Constitution, 70% of dues are turned back over to the local. It also shows the dues progression from $35.00 per month through May 2025 to $48.36 beginning in June 2025, and $49.81 beginning in January 2026.

JetBlue is therefore one of the strongest non-Southwest TWU examples for local identity and dues structure. What remains less visible is the local’s full annual treasury. Publicly, the story is a clear local body with a visible dues-return model and a documented startup / reimbursement relationship with TWU International, but not yet a fully verified local annual LM report in this review.

Important Limit

TWU is easier to follow than a multi-layered structure like CWA-AFA in one important respect: the flight-attendant groups reviewed here sit in identifiable locals, and at least one of those locals — Local 556 — files a clearly labeled flight-attendant LM-2.

But not every local filing has been independently verified in the reviewed public record yet. For Allegiant and JetBlue, this page therefore combines verified official local and carrier sources with verified TWU International financial signals. For FSI, this page relies on the official local site, the dues FAQ, the TWU release, and the Spring 2025 local profile while avoiding an unsupported claim that the Houston-address transactions in the reviewed International LM-2s can be cleanly assigned to Local 578.