That’s the management excuse of saying essentially that “we pay them enough to cover the time they are on duty.”

I calculated my “on duty” pay as a pilot for a smaller airline and it was ~$16/hr vs my stated hourly flight (door closed) pay.

For an experiment: Make a pilot rate $50/hr which sounds ok, but a 4 day trip is only 17 hours door closed time which pays $850 before taxes/medical, but the pilot is physically at the airport or on the plane for 37 hours over those 4 days which would be $22/duty hour. Now do the same for a flight attendant earning $21/hr. ~$350 for a 4 day trip, $9.45/duty hour.

So you can see pretty quickly why FA’s are fighting for better pay while on duty.

A big reason why so many flight attendant union protests point out that they can’t even afford to live in the cities the airlines base them to fly from.

There is “per-diem” pay which is supposed to help cover things like food and incidentals while on duty, but it is usually a pittance, $2-4 a duty hour. One $15 airport meal and a $25 dinner on the overnight would wipe out a day’s per-diem and then some, and a reason many crews bring their own food and snacks.