When This Pilot Quit Her Job, Her Employer Billed Her $20,000
Kate Fredericks, a pilot and former employee of cargo airline Ameriflight, is suing the company in a proposed class action lawsuit over the contract that Ameriflight made her sign.
Kate Fredericks quit her job flying for the cargo airline Ameriflight in late November 2021, six and a half months into her stint as a pilot based out of Puerto Rico. It was the most expensive resignation she could imagine.
Ameriflight told Fredericks she owed the company $20,000 for the cost of her training since she was leaving before working for 18 months. Fredericks had signed an agreement to those terms when she was hired, so she wasnât surprised the company expected her to pay up.
She had heard stories of other erstwhile Ameriflight pilots getting calls from debt collectors. Fearing the bill could wreck her good credit, she negotiated a payment plan directly with the company: $250 a month for nearly seven years. She started mailing the company a handwritten check each month because she was told they couldnât accept electronic payments.
âI was terrified. I didnât want someone banging on my door,â said Fredericks, whoâs 37 and lives in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. âSome tried to ignore it and had collections scare the living daylights out of them.â
Fredericks is now challenging the legality of that contract. She filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in federal court in Puerto Rico on Monday, arguing that the agreement she had to sign with Ameriflight amounts to an unlawful constraint of trade, trapping workers in their jobs to stifle competition and keep wages down.
Her Ameriflight debt is a high-priced example of what critics call âtraining repayment agreement provisions,â or TRAPs. These agreements require workers to compensate their former employers for the purported costs of training if they leave before working a certain amount of time. In a recent case that gained national attention, a PetSmart dog groomer was hit with a $5,000 bill for the retailerâs âgrooming academyâ when she quit her job after seven months.
The clauses have drawn the attention of the Federal Trade Commission because of the way they tie workers to their jobs and put a lid on pay. The agency recently issued a sweeping proposal to ban noncompete agreements, explicitly including training-repayment provisions in the plan. Employer groups are likely to sue the FTC in an effort to stop it.
But the FTC does not have jurisdiction over air carriers when it comes to addressing alleged âunfair or deceptive practicesâ â that responsibility falls to the U.S. Transportation Department. On Monday, several advocacy groups sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg asking that he follow the FTCâs lead and stop the use of training-repayment provisions in the airline industry. The groups alleged that at least six other aviation firms have used the clauses.
According to Fredericksâ lawsuit, an Ameriflight pilot could owe up to $30,000 depending on the training they received. In Fredericksâ case, her $20,000 tab would have been knocked down to $10,000 if she worked a full year after her training period. After 18 months, she wouldnât have owed anything.
Her complaint alleges Ameriflight withdrew the debt repayment agreement from new contracts last spring but continues to enforce it on pilots who signed it previously.
An Ameriflight spokesperson declined to answer questions about Fredericksâ lawsuit or the training repayment agreements, saying the company doesnât comment on litigation. Ameriflight, which is based in Dallas, serves as a âfeederâ airline contracted by overnight carriers like UPS and DHL.
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Fredericks filed her lawsuit with the help of Towards Justice, a legal aid group assisting workers, and the Student Borrower Protection Center, a nonprofit watchdog of the student loan industry. Attorney Mike Pierce, the centerâs director, said Ameriflightâs repayment agreement is another illustration of employers trying to foist the cost of workforce training onto workers.
He compared it to the exploitative practices used by many for-profit colleges.
âWhat we saw in this case was the same fact pattern as when someone walks in the door of a fly-by-night helicopter or flight training academy,â Pierce said. âInstead of recruiting vulnerable people off the street and selling a bill of goods, theyâre hiring people to become the next generation of pilots and using that position to take advantage of them.â
But Fredericksâ battle with Ameriflight is also a story about the tumultuous pandemic labor market â how it threw millions of desperate workers out of their jobs, then later handed them newfound leverage once the economy rebounded.
The daughter of a pilot, Fredericks started flying planes in early 2018. She said it took her a year and a half and around $80,000 to obtain her private pilot license, instrument ratings and other credentials sheâd need to find work. She financed the training with equity from a home sale and by working at a restaurant while she learned to fly.
Her first job was flying scenic tours in Bar Harbor, Maine; her next was flying aerial surveys in parallel lines. But a promising new job she took with Republic Airlines fell through once the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, as pilots and flight crews across the industry were laid off, furloughed or nudged into retirement.
Fredericks holds her fatherâs E6B flight computer, a flight planning tool that pilots must learn to use manually during training.
A friend from her old surveying job told Fredericks there was still a lot of work in Puerto Rico. So she went to the island and literally walked around the airport handing out copies of her resume, she recalled. She worked for a small commercial carrier before Ameriflight called with an offer in the spring of 2021. She understood she might be locking herself into Ameriflight for around two years. But the industry still hadnât recovered, and stable work remained hard to find.
âThereâs this pressure put on pilots. ... Youâve just dedicated two years of your life to nothing but flying,â said Fredericks. âI had done all of these things and completely restructured my life.â
Fredericks said her training period, during which she was paid $12.50 per hour, lasted around two months and took place in Puerto Rico and Dallas. That stint included the âPart 135â training that the Federal Aviation Administration requires for Ameriflight to operate its small cargo planes. Portions of the training were specific to the Beechcraft 99 planes that Fredericks would be flying. She said much of her in-the-air training with Ameriflight pilots was on flights in which the company was carrying cargo and making money.
An important question in Fredericksâ case is what her training was really worth and how well it would transfer to other carriers. Her lawsuit calls $20,000 a âgross overvaluation.â Fredericks said she gained little marketability for her Beechcraft 99 training (the modelâs production ended in the mid-1980s). She said she came to Ameriflight with 1,700 hours of flying time, well above the 1,200 hours Ameriflight required for incoming captains.
âThe training I received is a requirement by the FAA in order for them to operate as an airline in the U.S.,â Fredericks said. âYou canât just not do this training. If they didnât give me this training, I couldnât fly and they couldnât operate.â
Fredericks said her base salary at Ameriflight was around $55,000 per year. As the travel industry rebounded in 2021, her pay and schedule started to look less attractive compared to other opportunities. The same companies that had executed mass layoffs at the start of the pandemic were now competing with one another for a limited pool of workers.
âNow the airlines were like, âOh no, we need pilots, pronto,ââ Fredericks recalled. âIt was basic capitalism, supply and demand. It was an immediate flip. I watched it happening and said, âIâm going to miss the boat if I donât do something about this.â Compared to where the market was, I was underpaid, overqualified, and had a grueling schedule that didnât give me any time to see my family.â
Fredericks poses for a portrait at Hollywoods Beach in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts.
She left Ameriflight for another job at the end of November 2021. She and company officials were soon discussing her debt over email. Fredericks said she asked the companyâs chief pilot for an itemized accounting of training costs but didnât receive one.
Itâs not clear exactly when Ameriflight instituted the training repayment provision. Fredericks said she believes the company stopped using it last year because the tight job market would no longer allow it. (In August the company announced significant pay hikes for its pilots, setting a new base salary of $76,500 for captains.)
âWhen someone is offered a no-strings-attached job to fly jets in the normal hours of the day, or offered to be paid less and sign a TRAP and fly in the middle of the night â which one would you choose?â she said.
Ameriflightâs repayment agreement was the subject of heated online debate in at least one forum for pilots early in the pandemic. At the time, a poster who said they worked for Ameriflight defended the use of the clause. The job market had been flooded with lots of capable pilots and the company needed to hire the ones who would stick around, they wrote.
âOur training department spends a significant amount of time and Ameriflight spends a significant amount of money on each new hire,â the poster wrote. âWith the substantial uptick in qualified applicants, narrowing the pool down to candidates who agree to commit to Ameriflight for at least 18 months is the responsible thing to do.â
If Fredericksâ lawsuit succeeds, itâs possible her debt and that of other former Ameriflight pilots would be wiped out. They could also be entitled to damages. As part of the lawsuit, she is seeking an injunction that would forbid Ameriflight or its debt collectors from trying to enforce the clause.
Fredericks still has several years left under her debt repayment plan. She said she hesitated to file a lawsuit out of fear she could damage her job prospects and even be blackballed from airlines as a âproblem child.â But she wants to put an end to the practice.
âPeople need to be free to make their own choices and not feel like they have a debt theyâre carrying around like Atlas with the world on their shoulders,â Fredericks said. âNo one should feel like they donât have any options.â