[ How a culture of gross sexism in the airlines created
America’s most militantly feminist union. Every officer comes from
the ranks of working flight attendants, there is no gap between the
lived experience of the rank and file and union leadership.]
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A UNION OF THEIR OWN -THE MOST MILITANTLY FEMINIST UNION  
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Robert Kuttner
September 28, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ How a culture of gross sexism in the airlines created America’s
most militantly feminist union. Every officer comes from the ranks of
working flight attendants, there is no gap between the lived
experience of the rank and file and union leadership. _

collage: The American Prospect,

 

The first thing to appreciate about the Association of Flight
Attendants (AFA) is that it was born feminist. Its feminism and its
militance have nourished each other. The second thing to appreciate is
that AFA is among the most democratic of American unions. Every
officer comes from the ranks of working flight attendants, so there is
no gap between the lived experience of the rank and file and the union
bureaucracy.

“The people who are representing you are people who work your same
job, at your same airline, at your same base, and they understand
directly what the job is,” says Sara Nelson, who has served as AFA
president since 2014. “It also means you can also hold your leaders
directly accountable.”

Nelson, 50, is among the most charismatic and admired of union
leaders, even though AFA, with just under 50,000 members at 19
different airlines, is a relatively small union. After the death of
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in 2021, Nelson seriously considered
running to succeed him, but ultimately decided against it. (The labor
federation is now headed by Liz Shuler, its former
secretary-treasurer.)

The union is widely admired (or feared, depending on your viewpoint)
for the ingenuity and sheer nerve of its tactics. One technique, which
AFA has literally trademarked, is called CHAOS, which stands for
“Creating Havoc Around Our System.” CHAOS involves having a small
number of flight attendants walk off the job just as a flight is
boarding, with no advance notice to management. Unlike a conventional
strike involving all workers, where management can wear down a union
whose strike fund goes only so far, CHAOS disruptions involve only a
few workers and hit management where it is most vulnerable.

Nelson has also been very astute and audacious at using her political
influence. When the airlines began incurring massive losses as the
COVID pandemic took hold, it was Nelson who persuaded Congress to
approve the Payroll Support Program, an airline bailout of $25 billion
in grants and $25 billion in loans under the 2020 CARES Act. The
federal money was conditioned on no worker layoffs, no stock buybacks,
no dividends, and no raises to executives.

Nelson came up with the pro-labor terms after strategy sessions with
four staffers for Elizabeth Warren. She sold the unusual bargain to
key airline leaders and used her close alliance with House
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chair Peter DeFazio, a
fellow Oregonian, to make sure that this would be the deal, or no
deal.

American Airlines’ then-president Doug Parker, who had worked with
Nelson for more than a decade since his days as CEO of America West
and then US Airways, called Nelson at home on the evening of March 18,
2020, and enlisted her to come to the downtown Washington office of
Airlines for America. Some 20 glum-looking executives in suits had
been working all day in vain to sell their idea of an unconditional
bailout to key congressional leaders.

Nelson pitched her plan, picked up the phone, and called DeFazio. The
execs realized that she had far more influence than they did. Parker
credits Nelson for getting the deal done. “The airlines certainly
didn’t put those [terms] in,” Parker told an interviewer. “It
was good policy.” 

Stewardesses became feminists because of the daily humiliations at the
hands of male bosses and male norms.

The pandemic put off a long-awaited set of demands for flight
attendants. For more than a decade after the attacks of September 11,
2001, the airlines lost money. In 2020, after several years of
restored airline profits, several contracts were up for renegotiation.
But just as bargaining began, the pandemic hit. The airlines
collectively lost about $35 billion
[[link removed]] in
2020.

Contracts are up again at several major airlines, and with passenger
demand back and companies back to profitability, flight attendants are
ready to win their due. But despite inspired leadership, creative
tactics, and member solidarity, AFA faces a tough round of contract
bargaining, because the airlines find themselves in a different sort
of crisis—one that is self-inflicted.

The airlines stuck to the letter of the bailout agreements by not
laying off workers, but they violated the spirit by offering pilots
generous early-retirement packages to reduce their pilot payroll. They
then found themselves short of crews and vulnerable to chaos
(lowercase) when passenger demand returned. It was part and parcel of
an industry strategy to maximize profits by getting rid of all the
slack in the system—all flights booked full, few standby planes, and
few extra flight attendants.

Airlines offered reservations on flights that they lacked the crews to
staff. Holiday weekends produced long delays and tens of thousands of
flight cancellations. The Department of Transportation, which has
handled the airlines very gingerly ever since the disruptions of 9/11,
belatedly responded to consumer and media pressure and began levying
fines for deceptive practices.

So the flight attendants are in the position of pushing for
long-deferred gains in wages and work rules at a time when the
airlines are preoccupied cleaning up a mess of their own creation.
Before this round of bargaining is over, industry chaos may well lead
to labor CHAOS.

THE FIRST UNION OF CABIN ATTENDANTS, the Air Line Stewardesses
Association, was founded by United Airlines workers in 1945. All of
the organizers were women, at a time when the labor movement was
heavily male. The union’s founding president was Ada Brown, a
registered nurse who was working as a stewardess. “In that era,”
says Nelson, “there were not very many jobs that women were allowed
to do, and not a lot of respect for women’s work. The union was
formed to turn a job into a career.”

In just six months, Brown and seven other activists enlisted 75
percent of the stewardesses at United to sign union cards and won a
contract in 1946. “The fact that it was women who formed this union
and then demanded that it be a real democratic union means that our
union is as close to the membership as you can possibly get in terms
of decision-making power,” Nelson says.

From the beginning of flight attendant unions, issues of gender and
gender treatment have predominated. The first contract with United in
1946 included an innovative system that enabled stewardesses to bid
for flights based on seniority. The bidding system allows a flight
attendant to plan her schedule well in advance, to maximize time off
or time with family, rather than being at the mercy of management. The
system was also instituted, says Sara Nelson, “to make sure that
managers couldn’t try to exploit flight attendants by trading sex
for preferred schedules.”

At a time when retail, fast-food, and hotel workers at non-union
hotels have no control over their schedules, the flight attendant
bidding system seems far ahead of its time. It’s important to
remember that in 1946, the labor laws were still well enforced and
unions seemed here to stay. Stewardess organizing gained a tenuous
foothold at a historical moment when both the law and employer
assumptions were far more benign than they are today. William
Patterson, president of United in that era, was not hostile to
collective bargaining. He was the first airline executive to hire
stewardesses, in 1930, and he was fond of saying that stewardesses
needed a union. His only daughter became a stewardess.

In 1949, the Stewardesses union became a semiautonomous unit of the
Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), which had its own subsidiary
representing flight attendants at American. ALPA hoped the new
affiliation would increase their bargaining power. But stewardess
relations with the all-male pilots were at least as fraught as their
relations with airline executives.

In principle, the pilots wanted to help all occupations in the airline
industry to get organized. But in practice, they wanted to call all
the shots and have final say over decisions made by the stewardess
unit. “We were just sick and tired of the pilots telling us what to
do,” says Diane Tucker, a longtime union leader who has held
positions at every level of AFA and currently serves as the United AFA
benefits chair.

In 1973, there was a relatively amicable breakup with the pilots, and
AFA eventually got its own charter. “We had to leave a
male-dominated union, so that we could have our own say,” Nelson
says. “We believe we are the only union in America that was formed
by women and is still run by women.”

 

Sara Nelson, AFA president since 2014, is among the most charismatic
and admired of union leaders.  (Tom Williams/AP Photo  //  The
American Prospect)
Stewardesses did not become feminists because the profession attracted
young women with ideological motivations. The opposite was true. Most
were attracted by the perceived glamour, the schedule flexibility, and
travel opportunities, at a time when few occupations were open to
women. This led to widespread demand for the jobs. In 1961, United had
some 50,000 applications for about 350 openings. It was a buyer’s
market.

Nelson, from a conservative family in Corvallis, Oregon, became a
flight attendant at age 22 in 1996 because it beat waitressing. Nelson
says she had little knowledge or appreciation of unions until early in
her career as a flight attendant based in Boston, when her union rep
helped her collect delayed paychecks.

Only after being hired did stewardesses become feminists, because of
the daily humiliations at the hands of male bosses and male norms.

In the 1950s and ’60s, stewardesses were subjected to an array of
demeaning rules and inspections that seemed like a parody of sexism
and male domination. They had height and weight limits, and were
subject to girdle, bra, slip, and weight checks. Nail polish had to
come from an approved list of styles and hues. Hair coloring was
prohibited. They were not permitted to marry, and they could not work
beyond age 32. None of these rules applied to male employees.

The airlines liked women who stayed for a few years, and then left to
start families. Denying stewardesses long-term careers increased the
airlines’ bargaining power and saved them money on pensions and
health insurance. At United, the average stewardess stayed just 32.4
months. _The New York Times_ quoted United senior vice president for
personnel Charles Mason: “If that figure ever got up to thirty-five
months, I’d know we’re getting the wrong kind of girl. She’s not
getting married.” And this was in 1965, after the 1964 Civil Rights
Act.

In that era, most passengers were male. Pilots were exclusively male.
Airline executives were entirely male. And in the very era when
second-wave feminism was taking hold, the airlines became more
flagrant in their use of stewardesses as sex objects, presenting their
workers both as wholesome girls next door who welcomed you on board,
attended to your comfort, and served you food and drink—and who
maybe were available to do more, if only in your dreams.

In 1971, National Airlines sponsored an infamous ad campaign
portraying an actual stewardess, Cheryl Fioravante, with the
double-entendre tagline “I’m Cheryl. Fly me.” More women were
featured in the “Fly Me” ads, and the airline even named
individual planes for stewardesses to reinforce the theme. This led to
a protest at airline headquarters by the stewardesses and the National
Organization for Women with signs that read, “Go Fly
Yourself.”  

Just as the unions were triumphing over grotesque sexism, they were
losing crucial leverage to defend their members’ economic
conditions.

Braniff devised a kind of in-flight burlesque where stewardesses had
to change into six different progressively skimpier outfits during
long-distance flights. The ad promoting this had another
double-entendre headline: “Introducing the Air Strip … brought to
you by Braniff International, who believes that even an airline
hostess should look like a girl.”

Southwest, which used Love Field in Dallas, boasted, “We Make Love
Eighty Times a Day.” Air France ran an ad asking, “Have you ever
done it the French way?” Continental adopted the slogan “We really
move our tails for you.” As late as the mid-1970s, Continental
stewardesses were ordered to kiss all male passengers on the cheek as
they departed the plane. As Nell McShane Wulfhart writes in her
definitive history, _The Great Stewardess Rebellion_, “Many of the
men would swivel their faces around at the last second to catch the
stewardess on the lips.”

The ideal of Barbie, created in 1959, and the ideal stewardess were
products of the same era and culture. There was even a Braniff Barbie,
with four different outfits.

As early as the 1940s, some airlines had introduced male stewards and
pursers, who were paid better and not subjected to height, weight,
marriage, or age restrictions. In principle, all of this became
illegal with the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act and more
emphatically with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But neither act was
self-executing, and the airlines fought to keep the age, weight, and
marriage restrictions that applied only to women. Every single one of
these offensive practices was reversed by the flight attendants,
either via collective bargaining or through litigation.

In the class action case of _Sprogis v. United Air Lines
[[link removed]]_,
a federal district court in 1970 held that Mary Sprogis, terminated by
United in June 1966 when the airline learned she was married, had been
illegally fired and was entitled to reinstatement and back pay. United
appealed, claiming that marital status was a bona fide occupational
qualification under the Civil Rights Act. In 1971, the Seventh Circuit
Court of Appeals found for Sprogis and settled the marriage issue once
and for all. United had to pay some $33 million in back pay and
reinstate any of the 475 flight attendants terminated for marriage who
wanted their jobs back.

It took another lawsuit, by Celio Diaz, for the courts to establish,
in 1971, that men could apply to be flight attendants. Diaz had been
turned down by Pan Am, for being the wrong sex. For a time, the
airlines used the awkward terms “steward” and “stewardess” but
eventually settled on “flight attendants.”

As late as 1968, Pan Am was actually tightening weight limits, and
summarily firing any female flight attendant who was deemed
overweight. That was finally ended by a mix of litigation and
collective bargaining. Likewise the age limits.

Not until 1981 did the Supreme Court hold, in a class action lawsuit
brought by Mary Laffey, a flight attendant employed by Northwest, that
pay differentials for male and female cabin attendants doing the same
jobs violated both the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Pay Act. Rather
than accepting the decision, Northwest found reasons to appeal on a
technicality, and the case was finally settled in 1984, when a
three-judge appellate panel, made up of Robert Bork, Kenneth Starr,
and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, no less, awarded flight attendants $63
million in back pay.

AIRLINE DEREGULATION, ENACTED IN 1978, made the collective-bargaining
climate that much more arduous. Previously, regulation of routes and
fares guaranteed the airlines a fixed rate of return. So there was
little to be gained by hammering down wages, because any savings could
result in a downward adjustment of permissible fares to hold the
profit margin constant. Most airlines opted for good labor relations.
But with deregulation, the skies became a free-for-all.

At first, new entrants promised better service and lower fares. But
smaller new airlines were either forced out of business by fare wars
or acquired by larger airlines. The industry oscillated between the
ruinous competition that regulation had been devised to prevent, and
predatory unregulated concentration. All of the major carriers used
bankruptcies to shed debts and cut costs. According to Ganesh
Sitaraman’s new book, _Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It_,
there have been 189 bankruptcy filings since deregulation. When
airlines emerged from bankruptcy, one prime casualty was invariably
steep cuts in flight attendant wages, benefits, and working
conditions.

So just as the unions were triumphing over grotesque sexism, they were
losing crucial leverage to defend their members’ economic condition.
Ronald Reagan set the hostile, anti-labor tone of his era when one of
his first acts was to break the 1981 strike of air traffic controllers
and destroy their union, PATCO.

The 1970s and ’80s were also the era of corporate raiding, and
airlines were convenient targets. A corporate raider profits by
overpaying to gain control of a company, using borrowed money, and
then viciously cutting costs by slashing wages, laying off workers,
and gutting pension funds, all the while paying himself exorbitant
fees out of operating income, and piling the debt onto the balance
sheet of the target company.

In 1985, Carl Icahn, one of the most notorious corporate raiders, got
control of TWA, whose flight attendants were then represented by an
independent union. Icahn took the company private in 1988, gaining
$469 million in personal profit but adding $539.7 million in debt to
TWA’s balance sheet. He put the company through Chapter 11
bankruptcy in 1992. After Icahn exited, TWA went into bankruptcy twice
more, in 1995 and again in 2001, after which TWA was sold to American
Airlines. Along the way, bases in Pittsburgh and St. Louis were
closed, and profitable transatlantic routes were sold.

The Icahn takeover was a catastrophe for TWA’s 6,000 flight
attendants. After Icahn became chairman of the airline in 1985, he
demanded steep concessions
[[link removed]],
including wage cuts of 22 percent and work rule changes to save TWA
another 22 percent. To add insult to injury, the wage cuts demanded of
the mostly male mechanics totaled only 15 percent, on the premise that
female flight attendants were “secondary” earners.  

 

Most flight attendants are only paid after the airplane doors close,
despite time spent checking in passengers and stowing luggage.  (The
American Prospect)
In 1986, the union called a strike. Icahn hired permanent strike
replacements and was able to break the union. Thousands of flight
attendants lost their jobs. Some were eventually hired back but at
much reduced pay. It was in the aftermath of the TWA debacle that AFA
came up with the CHAOS strategy.

CHAOS was launched in 1993 to deal with a protracted contract dispute
with Alaska Airlines. The airline was enjoying record profits but was
stonewalling the union. Negotiations had dragged on for nearly three
years.

Unlike most labor-management disputes, which are covered by the 1935
National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), unions in the airline
industry are governed by the 1926 Railway Labor Act. That earlier law
was passed to reduce the incidence of crippling strikes in a vital
transportation sector, and was extended to the airlines in the 1930s.

Being subject to the Railway Labor Act rather than the NLRA has its
pluses and minuses. We saw one drawback just last year, when
Congress stepped in to block a freight rail strike
[[link removed]],
as it can do under the law. But one big plus is that in the event of a
contract impasse, either side can request mediation by the National
Mediation Board. If mediation fails to produce a settlement, the
mediator can release the company to impose work rules and the union is
free to call a strike.

Due to a quirk in the law, the strike need not involve all workers.
Leaders of AFA realized that they were permitted to devise
intermittent surprise labor actions—a few workers strategically
walking off the job in a fashion guaranteed to maximize disruption, at
minimal risk to most members. “Nobody had ever used the intermittent
strike provision of the Railway Labor Act before,” Nelson says. Thus
was born CHAOS.

In 1993, deliberate media publicity about the union’s new tactic and
its disruptive potential was enough to cut Alaska bookings by 20
percent even before a single flight attendant walked off, according to
Nelson. Alaska took the union to court. But a federal district court
in Washington state ruled
[[link removed]] that
intermittent striking is permitted under the Railway Labor Act. The
ruling also prohibited the airline from imposing any
discipline—including firing—for engaging in intermittent strike
activity.

“We created what we called the guts list, of flight attendants
willing to risk being fired for walking off the job during
boarding,” says Sandra Morrow, who led the L.A. local of Alaska
Airlines workers at the time of the first CHAOS action and still
serves on the Alaska negotiating committee. The first CHAOS strike
took place at Sea-Tac in August 1993, when three flight attendants
left an Alaska Airlines flight as passengers began boarding. This was
followed four days later when attendants walked off the last Alaska
flight out of Las Vegas. In September, AFA targeted five flights
simultaneously in the San Francisco Bay area.

The 24 striking flight attendants all were summarily fired. But Alaska
could not withstand the chaos and the passenger loss of confidence. It
soon caved. So did AirTran, US Airways, America West, and Midwest
Express, on the eve of threatened CHAOS strikes. Meanwhile, all the
flight attendants got their jobs back as part of the Alaska
settlement.

TODAY, ALASKA AIRLINES IS ONCE AGAIN a prime union target. The
airline is making record profits and is on track for net earnings of
$1 billion in 2023. It plans to spend between $75 million and $100
million this year on stock buybacks, but flight attendants haven’t
had a contract with a real raise since 2014.

The sexism continues. The company considers the (nearly all male)
pilots in short supply and the pool of (mostly female) potential
flight attendants almost limitless. Alaska pilots were granted a 23
percent raise as part of this year’s contract, plus another 11
percent “snap up” to put them on an equal footing with the
industry’s best-paid pilots at Delta and American.

Not only is Alaska refusing to offer flight attendants anything
comparable, but the airline wants a giveback in the form of a longer
standard workday, known as a duty day. Under the current contract, a
flight attendant must receive premium pay if she is scheduled for more
than 10.5 hours a day. Alaska wants to extend that to 11 or 12 hours.

Another issue in the Alaska negotiations and others is what’s known
as boarding pay. “In most airline contracts,” explains Nelson,
“we get paid only from the time the door closes to time it opens,”
even though flight attendants have to be at the airport well before
departure time and be on the plane to manage passenger boarding, and
check for safety equipment. The unpaid time can easily exceed an hour
on each flight when there are delays, plus more unpaid time at the
airport waiting to board. In this round of negotiations with both
Alaska and United, the union is demanding not just boarding pay, but
compensation for ground time as well.  

AFA’s major project is to finally organize the one longtime holdout,
Delta.

Delta, the only large non-union carrier, recently agreed to pay for
boarding time
[[link removed]] as part
of its strategy of matching or bettering union scales, as a union
avoidance mechanism. As if to taunt union carriers, a Delta vice
president wrote in her memo to flight attendants, “Our new boarding
pay component—an industry first—further recognizes how important
your role is on board to ensuring a welcoming, safe and on-time start
to each flight and for each customer.” Of course, without unions at
competing airlines, Delta would never have been provoked into offering
such a perk.

At Alaska, the issue of boarding pay and ground pay is connected to
another issue of so-called commuter employees. All of Alaska’s five
West Coast bases are in high-cost cities. According to Sandra Morrow,
“40 percent of flight attendants are commuters. They can’t afford
to live where they are based.” Commuting time getting to work from
other metro areas on other airlines, understandably, is not
compensated; but neither is the time waiting around the airport. The
airline has rigid rules that the union wants relaxed causing flight
attendants to be punished if they report late due to the fault of
another airline, which forces workers to arrive early and incur still
more unpaid time.

The union has requested mediation under the Railway Labor Act. The
mediation process, which includes a 30-day “cooling-off period,”
still has a few months to run before the union can be released by the
mediator to pursue a strike against Alaska Airlines, selective or
otherwise.

In August, flight attendants picketed Alaska at six West Coast
airports, from San Diego to Anchorage. They were joined by thousands
of workers from more than a dozen other unions. The picket signs read,
“Pay us or CHAOS.”

THE COMPLEX EARLY HISTORY OF ORGANIZING stewardesses, combined with
the saga of startups, bankruptcies, and mergers, has left a somewhat
fragmented union structure. AFA is the largest of the flight attendant
unions, with close to 50,000 members. It was once larger; Northwest
workers were represented by AFA, but after non-union Delta absorbed
Northwest, those attendants lost their union representation. In 2003,
AFA became an autonomous unit of the Communications Workers of
America, whose other units represent some 20,000 airline ground
workers.

The more than 26,000 flight attendants at American have their own
independent union, which was affiliated with the heavily male
Transport Workers Union. The union at American went through a parallel
odyssey to that of AFA, fighting rampant sexism in the industry and
the parent union, and left the TWU in 1977 to become the Association
of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA). The TWU organized and still
represents the 15,000 flight attendants at Southwest, and represented
Eastern Airlines attendants before that union went broke. And the
Teamsters represent flight attendants at several commuter airlines.

There have been occasional talks about a possible merger, but none is
in the offing. AFA and APFA display comparable militance and have
cordial relations. The fragmentation doesn’t seem to harm the
bargaining power of flight attendants, though it has led to some
jurisdictional spats over organizing campaigns. Unlike in industries
such as auto or steel, there is no history of targeted, industry-wide
pattern bargaining.

Next year will be a pivotal moment for the flight attendants. The
airlines are finally very profitable again after a two-decade roller
coaster.

Eight days after the September 11 attacks, as bookings fell by 96
percent, United laid off 20 percent of its employees, and furloughed
another 2,300 flight attendants in late 2002, when the airline
declared bankruptcy, which gutted AFA’s pension and health plans. At
United, the average annual salary for a flight attendant
[[link removed]] was
over $44,000 in 2002, but under $36,000 in 2007. The union took a 9
percent pay cut in 2003 and another 9.5 percent cut in 2005.

The Great Recession was another body blow. But the airlines returned
to profitability after 2011, with the four largest carriers averaging
a total of about $12 billion in annual profits by the middle of the
decade. It was time for the flight attendants to get their share.

 

In 2022, more than 180,000 flights were canceled, which cascades
through the system.  (Jonathan Brady/AP Photo  //  The American
Prospect)
But COVID blew those plans to hell. Three years later, the flight
attendants are back at the table, facing a flush set of airlines. In
2023, the International Air Transport Association projects that
industry profits will be around $10 billion.

American Airlines’ stalled contract negotiations with APFA parallel
those of airlines represented by the larger AFA. Between 2013 and
2019, when it was restraining worker wages, American issued stock
buybacks totaling $12.9 billion, more than its total payroll.

On August 30, APFA announced that members had voted overwhelmingly to
call a strike
[[link removed]] against
American if stalled contract negotiations do not improve.
“American’s Flight Attendants have not received cost-of-living
increases or any other quality-of-life improvements, even as they
played an essential part in keeping American in the skies both during
and after the pandemic,” APFA president Julie Hedrick said in a
statement.
[[link removed]]

Contract negotiations are complicated by several perverse industry
practices that do not lend themselves to the usual
collective-bargaining subjects of wages, hours, or work rules.

Since COVID, there have been intensified bouts of air rage, in which
angry passengers take out frustrations on flight attendants. A
customer may be furious over long flight delays; fights break out over
seat backs that passengers invariably slam into each others’ knees.
During the pandemic, flight attendants also bore the brunt of
passenger resentment for enforcing mask rules.

The Federal Aviation Administration reports that more than 9,000
“unruly passenger” incidents have occurred since the start of
2021. Diane Tucker also blames the influence of Donald Trump.
“Passengers who might have found some inconveniences merely annoying
now feel it’s OK to be belligerent,” she says.

The root cause of much passenger anger is shortsighted industry profit
maximization strategies that mash seat rows closer together to squeeze
in more customers and push capacity to its limits, leading to
cancellations and long delays in cases of mechanical and computer
problems or weather delays.

It is compounded by the airlines’ strategy of short-staffing. “We
used to be staffed at between 25 and 50 percent over the minimum
staffing requirements,” Nelson says. “Today they’re running all
the flights with minimum staffing and minimum planes. So when a flight
cancels, there is no give.” In 2022, more than 180,000 flights were
canceled.

The airlines’ sheer cheapness leads to other problems that frustrate
flight attendants. At United, when delays or cancellations occur,
flight attendants need to call a phone number to learn their
reassignment or whether to go home. United doesn’t have enough
schedulers to process the calls, so flight attendants end up waiting
interminably on hold and everything backs up. “I might be sitting in
Chicago and my flight is delayed,” says Diane Tucker. “I’m on
the phone trying to call in, but I can’t reach anybody.”

You would think all of this would be automated. But the requirement of
a live call is a relic of an earlier contract requirement intended to
protect workers. As Nelson explains, “Airline officials used to
leave messages for flight attendants through the pilots or gate
agents, but signals would get crossed.” The system of requiring
direct contact between the scheduler and the flight attendant worked
well enough, according to Nelson, until United failed to keep an
adequate staff of schedulers at a time when more and more flights were
getting delayed or canceled. “The company has screwed itself
here,” Nelson says.

In a more benign bargaining climate, with management less bent on
short-term profit maximization, the union and the company would work
something out. But rather than automating or hiring more schedulers,
United’s proposed remedy is to extend the number of hours that a
flight attendant has to hang around the airport waiting for an
assignment from the current four hours to six, a nonstarter for the
union.

In order to pursue durable gains in earnings and work rules, the
flight attendants find themselves in the position of having to
challenge the industry’s core business model, which harms workers
and passengers alike. This is far from the usual stuff of collective
bargaining.

IN ADDITION TO THE CURRENT NEGOTIATIONS with United, Alaska, and
other airlines, AFA’s other major project is to finally organize the
one longtime holdout, Delta. It’s been a long-term goal that would
increase the union’s membership by more than half.

In the Delta campaign, three unions that have often been rivals over
jurisdiction have agreed to a joint campaign. AFA is working to
organize flight attendants. The Teamsters are organizing mechanics,
and the Machinists are targeting ramp workers such as baggage
handlers. This is a historic first that maximizes the energy among the
workforce and the pressure on Delta.

Another plus is that when Delta absorbed Northwest in 2008, it also
took on several thousand flight attendants who used to be represented
by AFA and appreciated the benefits of a union. So the organizing
drive begins with that pro-union core, who can organize other workers.

The Delta campaign is by far the largest current organizing drive
against a single employer, according to Nelson. AFA has been
circulating cards for two years, and the number of signed cards keeps
growing. Under the Railway Labor Act, it’s harder for management to
pursue a strategy of firing pro-union workers, and this would also be
at odds with Delta’s benign image.

Unlike the fragmented efforts to organize fast-food or Starbucks
workers in very small units, or immense anti-union corporations like
Amazon or Walmart, the Delta effort has a real shot at succeeding. One
reason is that Delta is the holdout in an industry that is heavily
organized, with experienced unions in all the airline professions. The
other three major carriers—United, American, and Southwest—are
more than 80 percent unionized. At Delta, unions represent barely more
than 20 percent, mainly pilots.

Delta has relied on benign paternalism to keep out unions. But without
a union, the terms of employment can be changed on management whim.
Delta laid off thousands of workers during the pandemic and its recent
hires. As the airline has staffed back up, younger workers tend to be
more pro-union.

“These flight attendants are watching the Starbucks workers,” says
Nelson. “They’re hearing about Amazon. Unions are popular, and it
helps that the president talks about unions. I don’t know that
I’ve ever seen such a fertile environment for organizing.”

_[ROBERT KUTTNER is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect
[[link removed]], and professor at Brandeis University’s
Heller School.]_

_Read the original article at Prospect.org
[[link removed]].  _

_Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
[[link removed]], Prospect.org, 2023 [[link removed]].
All rights reserved.  _

_Support the American Prospect [[link removed]]._

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* Labor Unions
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* Flight Attendants
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* Strikes
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* airlines
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* Deregulation
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* Deregulation of the airlines
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* women's rights
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* Sara Nelson
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* Feminism
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* women workers
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* airline stewardesses
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* Airline Pilots Association
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* sexism
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* labor militancy
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* AFA-CWA
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* Association of Flight Attendants--CWA
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