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Thank you all for the amazing response to my last post. Punching Up got to number 14 on the “Rising in U.S. Politics” list on Substack. Still have a ways to go to before we’ll be able to read Heather Cox Richardson’s rear license plate, but we’re gaining, and my calendar is filling fast. As I said before, the success of this venture opens up other opportunities, including the one many of you have urged me to pursue. If I had a gratitude journal, you would all be in it.
Labor Day weekend was busy and a reminder of a lot of work to come. This year, it arrived on the heels of union steel-worker layoffs and the end of a flight attendants’ union strike at Air Canada. It came amidst the most union-hostile presidential administration since at least the 1980s and perhaps since the Gilded Age, when Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to “protect the mail,” and the attorney general issued an injunction [ [link removed] ] against the American Railway Union during the Pullman strike. In August, more than 445,000 Federal workers were stripped [ [link removed] ] of union protections, and Trump’s nominees for the National Labor Relations board have been anything but union friendly.
Last year, I was in the midst of a Congressional campaign and wrote a piece, “Throw Trygve from the Train [ [link removed] ],” about one of the three union jobs I have held. (I have removed the paywall from that piece.) This year, I recall my days as a member of the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) while flying for a regional airline out of St. Louis.
Like Air Canada, the flight attendants at that company were only paid from takeoff to landing. Unlike Air Canada, our flight attendants did not have a union. They had tried, but the company did everything they could to prevent them from organizing.
As a pilot at that company, I was paid from 30 minutes before we released the parking brake at the departure gate to thirty minutes after we set it at the arrival gate. If we had to sit on the taxiway for a while, that was just more money in my pocket. In the winter, we would sometimes deice, get to the runway, and then deice again. Everyone ahead of us was doing the same, so it wasn’t uncommon to take an hour or more to taxi from the gate to the runway. All that time, the flight attendants were working for free and were busy with passengers anxious to be on their way.
On the other end, we sometimes had to wait for an open gate and give way to departing aircraft, so the flight attendants would again be working for free and dealing with passengers who were itching to release their seatbelts and get off the plane.
Flight attendants take the brunt of customer dissatisfaction and deal with events that make pilots very happy to work behind a locked cockpit door. While we made the approach for landing in St. Louis one time, we had a passenger who bet she could outlast the intestinal discomfort that had her clenching her buttocks in her seat. She didn’t want to cause a ruckus by using the lavatory when we were so close to our destination and the seat belt sign was illuminated. Unfortunately, that woman lost her bet immediately upon landing. There is a point at which the anal sphincter just cannot continue an isometric workout any longer, and hers gave up at the exact moment the flight attendants stopped getting paid.
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When we got to the gate, the other passengers, highly motivated by the odor wafting through the cabin, exited the aircraft quickly and efficiently, some while holding their breath until they stepped onto the jetway. The flight attendants spent another 45 minutes helping that poor woman as she cleaned herself up and got into a pair of pajama shorts she had packed in her carry-on luggage. She joked that on the bright side, she wouldn’t have to face her fellow passengers at the baggage claim, because they would all have collected their luggage by the time she got there. She was very apologetic and grateful to the flight attendants, and that was all they got for going above and beyond the call of service. The aircraft remained out of service for several days.
My work over Labor Day weekend was much less foul, and the weather was beautiful. We haven’t had our first frost yet, but more yellow leaves flutter each day in the cottonwood tree we can see from our back patio, and the grass isn’t growing quite as fast as it did a week or two ago. The tomatoes are ripening fast, and we already have a pile of them on the kitchen table. An unusually wet July was very good for our garden, so my wife and I have become those people who offer fresh zucchini or beets or tomatoes to guests as they leave the house. Then we leave the grocery store and discover that some enterprising neighbor who planted even more zucchini than us and has left one atop the windshield wipers of every car in the row where we parked.
Soon it will be time to pull up the garden, but that is pleasant work. We have been harvesting our beets for weeks and eating beets and greens as a side to almost every meal. My wife says they keep you regular. I recommend staying away from them for a while before getting on an airplane.
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