DENVER (AP) -- Frontier Airlines Inc. said Thursday its flight attendants rejected a bid to unionize, the fourth time such a vote has failed.
The discount carrier said that 320 of the 744 participating employees voted to join the Association of Flight Attendants, 53 short of the minimum needed. Eight flight attendants voted for other representation.
The last vote to join AFA, which represents 46,000 flight attendants nationwide, was three years ago and failed by 11 votes.
Kelly Norton, an AFA mobilizing coordinator in Denver, said a group of flight attendants had also proposed forming an independent union and that might have affected the vote. That group didn't ask to be included in the balloting, she said.
''I would be very curious to see if they follow through with it or if it all was just a ruse,'' she said.
Norton said Frontier flight attendants generally have a good relationship with company managers but many have said they want to have a say in workplace rules.
Some of those rules have been changed recently without flight attendants' input, Norton said.
She said flight attendants have been allowed to cut their hours on the job to accommodate second jobs and child care, but the company recently capped those hours. A system for assigning flight attendants to different routes has been automated while they previously had been allowed to bid on routes, she said.
Denver-based Frontier flies to 43 destinations in 25 states and to five cities in Mexico.
