Planet Money - The flight attendants of CHAOS

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

When contract negotiations between Alaska Airlines and their flight attendants' union broke down in 1993, the union had a choice to make.The union — The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA — knew that if they chose to strike, Alaska Airlines could use a plan. While Alaska Airlines technically couldn't fire someone on strike, they could permanently replace the striking flight attendants with new workers. Essentially, if the union went on strike, they could risk thousands of people's jobs. The flight attendants knew they needed a counter-strategy.They went with a strategy they called CHAOS: "Create Havoc Around Our System."The strategy had two phases. Phase one: The union kept Alaska guessing about when, where, and how a strike might happen. They kept everyone, even their own members, in the dark. And in turn, Alaska Airlines had to be prepared for a strike at any place and any time. Phase two was to go on strike in a targeted and strategic way.The havoc that the flight attendants created set off a sort-of labor-dispute arms race and would go on to inspire strikes today. And, it showed how powerful it can be to introduce a little chaos into negotiations.Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. I am mildly obsessed with these moments in history, specifically sports history, when somebody looks at the way everybody is doing something and says, but wait a second, what if I tried it this totally unexpected other way? You know, famously in high jump, a guy named Dick Fosbury started jumping over the bar backwards, and it was so effective that now everyone does it. Or in baseball. At some point, a very clever player was like, what if instead of swinging at a fast-moving ball, what if I just hold the bat up to where the ball is gonna be and

knock it frustratingly into the infield. And the bunt is born. Love the bunt. And look, I'm obsessed with these moments because it forces everyone to be like, wait a second, can they do that? That can't be legal. But yeah, it is. And the game has changed forever. And Kenny, of course, these moments don't just happen in sporting competition. They happen in our world too, the world of economics and business. And there's an example that has become particularly relevant right now. Yeah. So we're in the middle of what people have been calling hot labor summer. I guess it's turned into, I don't know, unseasonably warm labor fall or whatever. But yes, we are seeing this spate of labor actions across the

country. Strikes in Hollywood, at hospitals and schools, at car factories. And you know, strikes are not so different from sports. They both have chanting and people holding up punny signs. But more importantly, they also have competing teams employing tactics and counter tactics and counter counter tactics. In other words, labor is kind of exactly the right kind of situation for the right person to come along and jump backwards over the way things are supposed to work and change labor disputes forever. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Nick Fountain. And if you had to pick a Fosbury flop bunt moment in labor history, a decent candidate might be what happened 30 years ago when one airline went to war with a group of scrappy flight attendants. Today on the show, the story of what happened when a union figured out how to strike without

really going on strike? It seemed too good to be true. There were legal challenges. There were shady flights to Guadalajara. And arguably, it's a case study that is still shaping the labor disputes we see today. Before we get into our story, you have to understand this enormous threat that has been hanging over airline unions for the last three and a half decades. Yeah, we're going to call it the TWA threat. Because in 1986, the flight attendants for Trans World Airlines, also known as TWA, were in a labor dispute with their airline. And it was looking like they were going to have to strike.

And, you know, the thing about a strike is if you generally follow all the rules and the letter of the law, the government protects that labor action. Like you are not allowed to be fired when you're striking. That's the deal. So, great. The TWA flight attendants went on strike. But what was so notable about what happened in 1986 is that TWA found a legal workaround, a way to effectively fire all those striking flight attendants without technically firing anyone. Apparently, when a flight attendant walked off the job, went on strike, it was legal for TWA to fill that newly vacated position.

TWA wasn't actually firing anyone, but the flight attendant that went on strike, well, they would have to wait until another position opened up. And of course, until that happened, that flight attendant was functionally fired. They weren't working. They weren't earning a paycheck. And the TWA move in 1986 was to do this on a massive scale. When the flight attendants went on strike, the company started replacing them. Thousands of people. It would take years before a new TWA job would open up for most of them.

They were all replaced by scabs. The sanitized term for it is permanent replacements. But you're a labor lawyer, so you call them scabs, sure. That's right. This is longtime labor lawyer David Borer. It was horrifying. And, you know, you look at that and you think, oh my gosh, we can't ever let this happen again. David was watching this TWA fiasco carefully because back then,

he was just starting out as the union lawyer for a different group of flight attendants, which included the ones that our story is about today, the flight attendants of Alaska Airlines. At Alaska Airlines, we discount fares, but we never discount service. discount fares, but we never discount service. So, we pick up a handful of years after the TWA stuff. It's 1993. David was negotiating the new contract for those Alaska Airlines flight attendants. And David says negotiations were not going very well. And so he and the flight attendants, they had started meeting to discuss what to do next. We spent the better part of a week talking about strategy and

we knew the guiding thing behind all of it was we can't do what the TWA flight attendants did. Right. Because now all of the airlines have the TWA playbook. So if your flight attendants go on strike, you just use the old TWA move and replace those pesky strikers. One of the people David was strategizing with. Good morning, Nick. It's Gail Bigelow. Gail Bigelow was an Alaska Airlines flight attendant and one of the union's lead negotiators. And she says this contract negotiation time, it was tense. Alaska Airlines was a smallish company and suddenly not everyone was on the same side. And so they had their people who were either married to or friends with or whatever from

different departments. And so they were getting information. I'm sure they weren't. Ooh, there were spies in your ranks. There were spies in the ranks. Yes, indeed. To avoid spies, David and Gail had started to hold secret strategy meetings. And really, the focus was trying to find a way around this sort of impossible problem, which was, if the flight attendants go on strike, Alaska Airlines is just going to use the TWA strategy and replace all of the flight attendants. David says they knew they needed a counter strategy. Of course. Sun Tzu says you don't attack your opponents directly, you attack their strategy.

Were you literally the guy quoting Sun Tzu's The Art of War at the union organizing meeting? Oh, yeah. Call me crazy. But, I mean, there's a lot in there. This idea of attacking their strategy was, like, correctly applicable. Attack the airline's strategy. Now, remember, the TWA move was to effectively fire everyone without technically firing anyone. Well, David and Gail thought, what if there is a way for us to effectively go on strike without actually going on strike? In other words, what if they could create the impact of a strike without the risk of a strike? On June 19th, 1993, the union calls a press conference. There's a bunch of chairs. There are people in chairs. There are cameras.

Mary Jo Manzanares was acting as a union spokesperson at that press conference. There are print reporters. There's television reporters. The big question, of course, was what were we going to do next? What were they going to do next? And if you were one of the reporters there, it was totally reasonable to expect the big announcement to be the Alaska flight attendants are going on strike. But what happens instead is pretty incredible. Mary Jo walks up to the microphone and basically says, we are not going on strike yet. We will strike, but we aren't telling anyone any of the details.

Here's Mary Jo making the announcement back then. So, where do we strike? When do we strike? What do we strike? I don't know. And none of you know. And none of management knows. And none of the traveling public knows.

and none of management knows, and none of the traveling public knows. The union's thinking was that Alaska Airlines couldn't replace the striking flight attendants if they weren't actually striking yet. And yet, the announcement made that threat of a strike very real. Mary Jo was at the podium saying that they could strike at any moment on any flight. She told the crowd of reporters that the union was calling this strategy chaos, which she was quick to point out was an acronym. Create havoc around our system. Create havoc around our system.

And you can think of the chaos strategy as like guerrilla warfare. You know, when you're up against a bigger, more powerful opponent, you keep them scrambling. You carefully pick the moment you're going to attack. Hopefully, that forces your opponent to prepare for anything and everything constantly. And you know who loves a good guerrilla warfare airline chaos story? Now, live at 11 o'clock, Como News 4. Good evening, everyone.

If you fly Alaska Airlines, a labor dispute... The television news. ...travel plans. Alaska flight attendants are threatening to create chaos this summer for passengers aboard the airline. Yeah, I mean, this was made-for-TV-news stuff. What's a better story than chaos in the skies or pay us or chaos? We just don't know when this stoppage or slowdown or disruption of service is going to occur, but it could happen literally any moment, David. And of course, that's the tactic

of the flight attendants is not to let anybody know that threat that something might happen at some time. Has it had any effect on bookings by the airline? As a matter of fact, it has. The company would get into specifics, give us absolute numbers, but they did concede today that yes, the number of bookings is down because of this. Yes, the bookings were going down. And this was key. The union was basically getting the benefits of a strike without suffering the consequences. Right. Because if you think about the way a normal strike works, it's all about inflicting economic harm on your opponent. So like the company won't make any money because their workers have walked off the job, but also those workers aren't getting paid either. Normally, both sides are taking the financial hit.

But, but, with the flight attendants here, their airline was losing bookings because of the strike threat, and yet the Alaska flight attendants weren't actually striking yet, so Alaska still had to pay them. And if chaos was the strategy, flight attendant and union negotiator Gail Bigelow says it was working better than she had ever expected. I had people calling me at my home saying, oh, I have tickets to take my kids to Disneyland. Please don't strike my flight. I mean, people I barely knew.

And so it was working. Chaos was working. No one knew what would happen next, says union lawyer David Borer. And that was part of the strategy, was to keep them guessing. Sun Tzu, to go back to Sun Tzu, says a confused enemy is easily defeated. I know it's corny and everything, but strikes are so much like warfare that it's actually directly applicable. Now, this whole not striking, but threatening to strike thing, this was just phase one of the chaos strategy because the union knew this phase could only last so long. Like eventually they would become the flight attendants who cried strike over and over

and people would stop taking their threat seriously. Phase two of chaos was coming. A real strike somewhere, sometime, just eventually. In the meantime, Alaska Airlines, they were preparing for that moment. Greg Witter was a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines at the time, and he was in the boardroom helping to figure out Alaska's plan, their counter move for when

those strikes finally did begin. In preparation for the fact that there could be a strike, all the management personnel were trained as flight attendants. So that if there is- Including you? Including me. Yep. Yeah, I went off to three weeks of flight attendant training. Tell me about going to flight attendant school. Yeah. Very intense. Intense because, of course, being a flight attendant is so much more than safety demos and handing out little bags of pretzels or whatever. Yeah. Greg says he had to practice for an emergency landing, pass a pretty rigorous swim test. Memorize a phone book-sized safety manual.

You've got to learn basically every inch of every aircraft you fly. You've got to know the least risk bomb location. The what? Latches for this. Oh, the least risk bomb location. So if someone on the plane says they've got a bomb in the bag and you're able to wrest that bag away from them, where can you put that bomb on the aircraft where it would do the least damage if it went off?

That's a thing? What? That is a thing. Absolutely. The least risk bomb location. Absolutely a thing. And what is the least risk bomb location? Should we even tell people this, Nick? Is this dangerous information? It's helpful information. Okay. Okay. Greg says it's usually behind the engine. Least risk bomb location behind the engine. There you go.

So Alaska was training people like Greg the press guy and hundreds of other manager types, not to become full-time replacements, but as stopgap attendants for the moment the union finally started to strike. Yeah, right. Because Alaska Airlines was worried about the strike starting like in the middle of the flight or something. And so they actually started booking seats for Greg and this crew of managers trained to be flight attendants onto as many flights as possible. That way, if the strike did start mid-flight, one of those people could jump up and suddenly become a flight attendant. Greg says he was assigned to literally just sit on the flight from Seattle to Guadalajara,

Mexico over and over again. At one point, he says he even got pulled aside by the Mexican authorities. I just, I remember my heart was pounding when they hauled me into the back room and I thought, oh my God, I know exactly what they're thinking here. And I presume they thought it was a drug mule of some kind. Sure. Who's this guy that keeps flying from Seattle to Guadalajara every four days, you know? Now, having Greg and lots of other management people flying around and sitting at airports, this was just a way to temporarily keep flights going when the big strike eventually did happen.

But Alaska's bigger move was going to be the TWA strategy. As soon as the attendants walked off the job, Alaska could replace them with an army of new flight attendants. Of course, Alaska had to hire that army. They had to find a whole new workforce. And so Alaska held a giant job fair, even sent their assistant vice president of employee relations to this thing. We are going through the selection process to put people into training for future openings.

And this, by the way, is the weirdest job fair I have ever heard about. For one, remember, Alaska didn't have any jobs to fill yet since no one was striking yet. But also there are people picketing the job fair and reporters are asking the job fair attendees basically like, hey, don't you feel bad signing up to take a job from someone who's going to go on strike? I'm not worried about them. I got a wife and kids to support. You know, that's their problem. I don't know them. So if I knew him personally, it'd probably hurt, but I don't, so it doesn't bother me. Okay, so our two sides have their strategies. The flight attendants have chaos, their constant strike threat without actually striking yet. And then Alaska is preparing for the moment that flight attendants finally do strike, preparing to go full TWA, hiring their army of

replacements. After the break, the strike begins. 21, The Social Network, and now Dumb Money. all films based on books written by Ben Mesrick. My dream was never, you know, win a Pulitzer or win a National Book Award. My dream was always having a tie-in paperback that said, now a major motion picture. Mesrick takes flashy true stories and turns them into books that can be made into movies. For the past 10 years, every one of my books has a movie deal before I present it to the publishers. In our latest bonus episode, a business model that feeds Hollywood's hunger for true life stories. That's for Planet Money Plus listeners. If that's you, thank you for your

support. If it's not, it could be. Sign up at plus.npr.org. If it's not, it could be. Sign up at plus.npr.org. The chaos campaign had two phases. Phase one, threaten to strike at any moment. And then phase two, actually strike, actually have flight attendants walk off the job. Two months into the campaign, they decided it was time to move into phase two. Gail Bigelow had been collecting the names of her fellow flight attendants who were willing to walk off the job. And they got put on what she called the guts list. They have the guts to do it. Yes. It was that's the guts list.

Because going on strike as a flight attendant very likely meant getting permanently replaced. You know, because of the looming TWA strategy. Well, it was frightening for me because I was in a position to try to encourage the flight attendants to strike. You were asking them to take a crazy risk. They might all lose their jobs. It was a crazy risk. Yes. It was also this huge puzzle for the flight attendants. Phase two of chaos meant actually going on strike. And yet, the moment a flight attendant walked off the job, Alaska was allowed to replace them, pull the old TWA move. Gail and the union team thought they just might have discovered a way around this, a way to strike without getting replaced. Yeah, it was a very clever, very chaotic kind of counter move

to the entire TWA strategy, but they couldn't be sure that it would work until they actually tried it. The moment of truth came on August 20th, 1993, and the whole thing unfolded like a SEAL Team 6 mission or something. The target? A fully booked 6 p.m. flight leaving out of Alaska's hub in Seattle. That flight had a crew who had signed up for the guts list. One of those flight attendants was Jennifer Price. She says it was a seemingly normal day. She was at the airport when a union official walked up to her and said, Okay, Jennifer, we've chosen your crew. You will be striking your flight. Jennifer calmly gets on the plane, stows her baggage, does the pre-flight checks.

She's there with her fellow flight attendants, Chris and Barb. The boarding agent came down to the plane and said, are you ready to board? And Barb said, no, we are not ready to board. On the advice of our union, we're engaging in strike action and we won't be available to perform our work assignment. And you could see the agent's eyes getting bigger. And then she said, you're kidding. No, I'm not. And we grabbed our suitcases and walked off the airplane. Jennifer and her crew walked past the passengers who were all ready to board. She says they looked confused.

They looked like they were getting worried. And at this exact moment, Gail Bigelow, who's back at Strike headquarters, sends a fax to Alaska Airlines saying, We are writing to inform you that we are striking this one flight, flight 536 out of Seattle's airport. There it was. The strike had officially begun. Yes, it was just one flight crew on one flight, but this was the moment Alaska Airlines had been preparing for.

Yeah, an emergency team of those managers that were trained to be flight attendants jumps into action to sub in for that striking flight crew. But, of course, the bigger Alaska strategy was the TWA strategy. As long as Jennifer and her crew were on strike, Alaska was allowed to permanently fill the positions they'd just walked out on, to effectively fire Jennifer while she's on strike. But after just 28 minutes of the strike, Gail Bigelow sends a second fax to Alaska Airlines saying, actually, strike's over now. And here's why that is a genius move. Alaska hadn't actually managed to get the paperwork together or whatever it would take

to permanently replace Jennifer's flight crew during that 28-minute strike window. That crew was no longer on strike, and so the union was pretty sure Jennifer's group of attendants was now safe from getting TWA'd, from getting replaced. Here's Gail Bigelow again. The three of them came back to strike headquarters then, and I can remember the picture of them. They were all very relieved to be in strike headquarters, knowing that they were going to get their jobs back. Flight attendant Jennifer Price remembers that moment, walking back into headquarters that night. Oh yeah, they cheered. We were the heroes of the day. It was, you know, that was helpful.

The kind of strike that happened that night, it has a technical name. It's called intermittent striking. Yeah, you know, the idea is instead of everyone going on strike and then staying on strike, you do a bunch of little strikes. In this case, you strike one flight at a time and just for a tiny window of time. and just for a tiny window of time. And the union was hoping that this would make it incredibly hard for Alaska to actually catch and permanently replace attendants while they were on strike. And the flight attendants kept attacking this way.

Four days later, they struck a flight out of Vegas, then hit five Bay Area flights on the same day. And it was chaos every time this happened. Alaska had to scramble to get their managers onto these flights as the same day. And it was chaos every time this happened. Alaska had to scramble to get their managers onto these flights as flight attendants. Alaska spokesperson Greg Witter remembers being at Seattle's airport when somebody from his company comes like running up to him. We have a walk-off. And it was me and two guys from marketing. We were hailed, It was me and two guys from marketing.

We were hailed. You guys got to go work a flight. Oh, my God. All three of us. The blood drained out of our faces. So Greg rushes to get on the flight. And then he realizes he's going to have to give the iconic safety demo. My heart literally was about coming through my throat while I'm doing this safety demonstration. I had cold sweats.

Oh my God. My palms were all sweaty and clammy. It was terrible. How many flights do you think you did that day? One, two, three. God, I think probably at least three until we got to fly home. Greg can't exactly remember because it was a total mess. It was clearly an unsustainable solution for Alaska. And it had been just three weeks of this intermittent striking. In the end, here is how this whole tactic counter tactic battle wound down. In what feels a little like an act of desperation, Alaska Airlines said, you know what? We think this intermittent striking thing, we think it's actually not allowed. So forget being replaced. If you do this, you're going to

get straight up fired. The union took Alaska Airlines to court and the court sided with the union. They said intermittent striking is protected by law. And the union's like, okay, then we're going to keep doing these intermittent strikes until we get a decent contract. Less than two weeks later, Alaska proposed what Gail thought was a pretty decent contract. Gail had been at this for more than three years. And just like that, it was over. I was like, oh, my gosh, I have my life back. I mean, really, that's how I felt.

I have my life back. But in seriousness, I felt really good about it. I felt the contract was a good contract. David Borer, the Sun Tzu quoting lawyer, agrees. He says the new contract was phenomenal for the flight attendants. So it was a great victory in your head. Yeah, like the poster on my wall, total victory. I mean, we didn't lose a single job. Nobody who struck lost any income. And we got a contract with a 60% raise that we hadn't

even asked for. David thinks it was the most successful labor strike of a generation. And he says the chaos strategy has kept working for the union. Since that Alaska flight, not a single flight attendant from David's union has had to strike in the U.S. The mere threat of chaos has been enough. And I suppose it is reasonable at this point to then wonder, why doesn't every strike use this exact same chaos playbook? It seems like the obvious thing to do. Well, the answer to that one is a little in the weeds. So airline strikes and actually railroad strikes too have one set of rules, but most other strikes are governed by a different set of rules. and those rules don't allow for this kind of intermittent on-again, off-again striking.

Yeah, so for instance, we've got this United Auto Workers strike happening right now. Once the UAW announces, for example, that the Ford Assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan is now on strike, well, those workers are going to need to be on strike until the dispute is over. They're not allowed to 20 minutes later say, oh, hey, never mind. This plant strike is over. But what has been really interesting to watch are the ways that the U.N.W. and their president, Sean Fain, do really seem to be introducing chaos where they're allowed to. Attorney David Boer has noticed this, too. Nobody's asking Sean Fain, well, how long do you think you can hold out? They're all saying, oh, when are you going to strike the next plant?

And that's exactly how it was with Alaska. Right. Because what the UAW has done is start by striking at three auto factories. And then it has added a strike at a factory somewhere else. And then at somewhere else. And then somewhere else. The rhythm of this UAW strike is sounding a lot like the chaos strike from 30 years ago. Yeah, it's funny. I was driving to work the other day and heard a report from our colleague, Camila Dominovsky, about the UAW strike. Here, we'll play a little bit of it for you.

No one knows how long these strikes will last or what kinds of locations could be targeted next, or even which companies. The union has said... So yeah, I heard that and I just thought like, wow, that sounds so similar to that wild press conference 30 years ago when the Alaska flight attendants first introduced chaos to the world of labor. So where do we strike? When do we strike? the world of labor. So where do we strike? When do we strike? What do we strike?

I don't know. And none of you know. And none of management knows. And none of the traveling public knows. You can email us at planetmoney at npr.org, or you can find us on TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram. We're at Planet Money. Our show today was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler, with help from Dave Blanchard and Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was mastered by Hans Copeland.

Ida Parasid helped with research. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Shout out to the Wall Street Journal reporters Nora Eckert, Mike Goliath, and Ryan Felton, whose mention of the chaos strategy in an article about the UAW's present strategy turned us on to this story. I'm Nick Fountain. I'm Kenny Malone. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

for helping to support this podcast.