Flight Attendant and Labor Leader
Unlike the British, no American is born predestined for national leadership. So, the story of a girl who was comfortable as the lead in a school play whose first adult job was serving tables in a restaurant while holding three other part-time jobs, later rising to national union leadership and praised for helping to keep airlines flying, is truly an American success story.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Sara Nelson (SN) was born into an Oregon family which dedicated their religious life to Christian Science. Her father worked for a lumber mill. Her mother was a music teacher in the local public schools, who also had a successful singing-telegram business on the side.
CHILDHOOD
Singing telegram customers would call SN’s home at all hours. Belly dancers, known as Belly Tellys, hired to deliver many of the telegrams, would stop by the family’s house to pick up their paychecks.
SN grew up singing in a children’s choir which her mother had founded. At school, SN starred as Maria in a production of ‘West Side Story.” A classmate recalls that “Everyone was drawn to her. She had that vibrant, acting kind of personality, where she’s just onstage, but in the best of ways.”
Her friend also recalled that at sports events, SN would always emphatically root for the school’s team. “Everyone would turn and smile because they could hear her – this little person, and she would have this super-booming voice.”
EDUCATION
Following high school graduation, CN enrolled at Principia College, a small liberal-arts school founded by a Christian Scientist in southwestern Illinois.
FIRST JOBS ARE NEVER A BINDING ADULT CAREER COMMITMENT
After college graduation, with no long-term career plan, SN worked as a waitress to earn money to support herself. Eventually she secured future employment – nine months away – as a high school English teacher. In the meantime, she was juggling three part-time gigs in addition to working as a waitress.
One winter day, SN received a phone call in the frozen north from her best friend in college, who asked, “Guess where I am?” The answer: “The beach in Miami!” After college, the friend had started working as a flight attendant for United Airlines. Now, on the phone, she went on and on about the job’s perks, including layovers in warm locales.
SN wondered if she should apply for such a job. She recalled thinking, “I’m freezing my ass off, working four jobs, and life is hell. O.K., all right. I’ll check this out.” As it happened, United was holding a recruitment event the next day in Chicago, a five-hour drive from St. Louis. SN gave her restaurant shifts to a co-worker, got in her car and began heading north.
When she arrived at the event, “there were applicants in line crying. They would start to talk about how much they wanted this job, and they would get emotional.” United called the event an open house but there were so many people that SN referred to it as a ‘cattle call.’
SN made it to the second round of interviews, at which point the airline administered a test to make sure that each applicant could speak a second language – a desired qualification for flight attendants at the time. SN had taken a German language course in college, was “barely conversational” but somehow she passed. After enduring a physical exam and making it through six weeks of training, SN was hired.
ROOKIE FLIGHT ATTENDANT
United assigned SN to its Boston area, a base for about 300 flight attendants. That fall, instead of commencing her first planned career as a teacher, she moved to an apartment in Boston, which she shared with seven other rookie flight attendants.
SN spent the first few months working on call, filling in whenever the airline was short a flight attendant, but soon she had enough seniority to arrange a monthly schedule and eventually she was able to work the most desirable trips, like the non-stop flights to San Diego. For the trip, SN’s packing would include her swimsuit, depart Boston at 8:30 a.m. and land before noon Pacific time. “We’d have all day where we could go to the beach. If you went on a Tuesday or Wednesday, the only other people on the beach were likely airline employees,” recalled SN.
After working at a restaurant, SN appreciated the autonomy that came with being a flight attendant. “We don’t have managers watching us,” she noted. “When we get up there, we control the workspace.” Once the plane took off, she and her co-workers would ‘read the room’ and if the passengers seemed to be in a ‘festive mood’ the flight attendants might hold a trivia contest, awarding a bottle of champagne to the winner.
Even on her days off, SN spent time in the sky; she could fly for free, so on one of her first vacations she flew to Honolulu.
LABOR UNION INVOLVEMENT
The airline’s Boston base was a ‘union shop.’ United flight attendants are members of the Association of Flight Attendants – founded in 1945 by a group of United ‘stewardesses’ – the largest (as of 2022) flight attendants’ union, representing workers at eighteen different airlines.
At United, nearly all the flight attendants wore their union pins. At the Boston base, SN soon discovered there was a “group of very, very senior flight attendants who were quite militant.” In 1985, United pilots had gone on strike and the flight attendants had also struck in solidarity. More than a decade later, some flight attendants still carried around a “scab list” to identify workers who had crossed the picket line for subsequent punishment (informal and unauthorized by the company) “like somebody is working a flight to Des Moines, and they find out their personal bag is in Hong Kong.”
SN’s knowledge of unions was then minimal. But her first few weeks on the job taught her about the benefits of union membership. Leaders of the local union council introduced themselves immediately and took the new hires on a trolley tour of the city. Not long after, when one of SN’s paychecks was late arriving, a co-worker offered to loan her eight-hundred dollars and then advised her to call the union for assistance.
The union helped SN get paid and it also helped alleviate the sense of alienation that she felt as an employee of a huge corporation. “It was the first time in my life that I knew what it meant to be a number,” she said. “The idea that you would have each other’s backs, that you would be welcoming – it felt right. I identified with that right away.” Within a few months, SN was volunteering with her local union council.
SN began devoting a lot of her off-duty time to union work. She became the vice-president of her local council. At age 29, SN became the national spokesperson for the United chapter of the A.F.A.
At age 49 (2022), SN was the International President of the A.F.A., representing 50,000 flight attendants in the industry. She frequently testifies at congressional hearings, where sometimes she is the lone woman seated alongside the C.E.O.s of the nation’s largest airlines.
During a government shutdown (2018 following an impasse in Congress over national debt issues) when hundreds of thousands of federal employees – including T.S.A. (Transportation Security Agency) workers – went unpaid for weeks, SN gave a speech calling for a general labor strike (work stoppage) of all U.S. workers across all industries. The speech got national attention. When a news reporter suggested that SN was threatening to shut down the whole economy, she calmly responded “Yes.” But eventually, SN was credited with helping to end the shutdown, prompting the NY Times to describe her as “America’s Most Powerful Flight Attendant.”
Before the covid pandemic (2020 – 2022), SN was already one of the most visible leaders in the U.S. labor movement – a surprising achievement, considering that her union is relatively small. (The American Federation of Teachers, with 1.7 million members, is nearly 35 times the size of the A.F.A.; the Teamsters, with 1.2 million, is about 25 times the size.)
Ironically, the promise that drew SN to this profession years ago – the idea that it offered autonomy and a chance to see the world – has been overshadowed by the reality that airplanes have become an increasingly stressful place to work.
CHALLENGE – STRESSFUL WORK ENVIRONMENT
The pandemic had raised SN’s profile, bringing new attention to her and the A.F.A., as the working conditions of her union’s members worsened. According to the F.A.A. (Fed. Aviation Admin), a record seven thousand-plus ‘unruly passenger’ incidents have occurred on airplanes since the start of 2021, although the term ‘unruly’ doesn’t begin to capture some of this behavior, such as a video which led to a news headline describing the assault of a Southwest flight attendant who lost 2 teeth.
CHALLENGE – LAYOFFS
Eight days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which utilized hi-jacked planes to crash into the World Trade Center buildings in NYC, killing hundreds of office workers and emergency responders plus related incidents elsewhere in the U.S., customer demand for airline tickets plunged. United downsized its workers by 25%. SN managed to hold on to her job but the possibility of national and international events which affect an airline’s need for staff (e.g. pandemic, terrorist attack) over which airline employees have no control, persists.
CHALLENGE – SEXISM IN THE CABIN
While very infrequent, it’s hard for SN to forget incidents like the time a male passenger approached her from behind while she was standing alone in the galley (where the passengers’ food is stored). “He ran his hand along the outside of my hip and down around my rear end, saying, “What, no girdle? How can you look this good in your uniform without a girdle?” SN was stunned; no one had ever warned her about such behavior. “So, you just try to protect yourself and then tell the rest of your crew, ‘Hey, watch out for Handsy in 5-F,” said SN.
DEDICATION TO HER UNION INCREASED HER LEADERSHIP ROLE
The 9-11 terrorist attacks continued their negative impact on customer demand, leading United to file for protection from its creditors through declaring bankruptcy. Having to drastically cut its expenses, United furloughed another 2300 workers, which added to the stress upon union leadership. When SN heard that news, she said her first reaction was to think to herself, “I can’t take any more of this. I need a minute to cry,” which she did. “Then, after about a minute, something clicked in me. And I just thought, ‘OK, well, this is it. This is the moment that I’m committing. We have to fight like hell every single day to hang on to everything we possibly can.”
The bankruptcy proceedings dragged on for thirty-eight months and among the union’s most protracted battles was to save its members’ pensions. That effort lasted a year, with flight attendants lobbying Congress, litigating in court and preparing for a possible strike.
One morning, SN brought a group of flight attendants, all wearing their uniforms, to the regularly scheduled breakfast meeting for his constituents, hosted by a U.S. Senator, Barack Obama. Then Senator Obama took serious interest in their situation, meeting with union officials and United’s C.E.O., resulting in the flight attendants obtaining a retirement plan that, according to SN, was “more than double the amount that United had wanted to pay.”
The victory was bittersweet since United later reduced their workers’ hourly pay and health insurance coverage. Many flight attendants left their jobs over the years of uncertainty, some losing their homes and marriages over the financial stress.
During the continuing political negotiations over the government funding an airline “buyout” SN as a union leader, advised the head of American airlines to adopt a new strategy to benefit both the airlines and their workers. Speaking directly to the C.E.O., she told him “Listen, here’s the deal. You guys are having a hard time because the public hates you. There is no way that you are going to get anything from the government in this political climate. But if we construct (a proposal for government backed loans) in a way that it’s about the workers – that it’s about your frontline people, who people identify with – then you’ll get something.”
SN’s advice led to federal aid being paid directly to the workers with important conditions including a cap on airline executives’ pay and a ban on stock buybacks.
CAREER SATISFACTION
The American Airlines executive who worked with SN to negotiate with government leaders later said, “It doesn’t sound historic, but having a labor leader sit around with five C.E.O.s and work through how we’re going to stop airlines from shutting down was a pretty big deal.”
The same executive recalled first huddling among his fellow executives, trying to figure out how to deal with the lead government negotiator, (a U.S. House of Representative), Peter DeFazio. When SN joined their meeting, the American Airlines exec overhead SN’s end of a phone call, where she was saying, “No, no, that’s not it. You sent me the wrong one.” The exec thought SN had been speaking to another union official but after SN hung up, saying “OK, thanks, Peter,” it became evident that SN had been talking to the government representative in a persuasively direct way, which led to the final agreement preserving the airlines and their workers’ jobs.
Standing onstage to receive an award, the C.E. O. of American Airlines told the audience, “If it weren’t for Sara Nelson and her leadership, we would have shut down, furloughed virtually everyone and then waited for customer demand to return until we started bringing employees back and flying. If keeping several hundred thousand aviation professionals employed and the U.S. airline industry flying was important to you, please join me in thanking Sara Nelson.” Then the crowd rose and applauded her.
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This career story was based on an article written by Jennifer Gonnerman, published by The New Yorker magazine on May 30, 2022 plus internet research.
