Throughline - How U.S. Unions Took Flight

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Hot Labor Summer has continued into fall as workers in industries from retail and carmaking to healthcare and Hollywood have organized and gone on strike. Public support for the U.S. labor movement is close to the highest it's been in 60 years. And that's no surprise to people who work in one particular industry: the airlines.Airline workers — pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, baggage handlers, and more — represent a huge cross-section of the country. And for decades, they've used their unions to fight not just for better working conditions, but for civil rights, charting a course that leads right up to today. In this episode, we turn an eye to the sky to see how American unions took flight.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. August 3rd, 1981. President Ronald Reagan is holding a press conference in the Rose Garden. This morning at 7 a.m., the union representing those who man America's air traffic control facilities called a strike. About 13,000 air traffic controllers, federal employees who make sure planes take off, fly, and land safely,

had walked off the job calling for better wages and work hours. The president wasn't happy about it. And if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated. President Reagan kept his word. Two days later, he broke the strike by firing 11,000 striking employees and replaced them with non-union workers. It was a huge moment, a clear signal to America and American businesses. Unions and strikers are not working class heroes whose footsteps should be followed. They're troublemakers, and you don't have to stand for it. Reagan's power move started a cascade. Over the next few years, strikes were broken left and right.

Union workers lost their jobs and unions lost power. Bit by bit, year by year, they became artifacts of American history. Or did they? The summer of strikes. The summer of strikes. The summer of strikes has affected everyone from delivery workers and Amazon workers to Hollywood writers and actors. Or did they? Halt. United Auto Workers has launched an historic targeted strike. Thousands of Kaiser Permanente health care workers across the nation walking out. Starbucks Workers United organized a strike in an estimated 100 cafes across the country. What a summer it has been for American labor. Right. So organized labor is actually surging.

In the past few months, workers in industries from retail and car making to health care and Hollywood have organized and gone on strike. I think it's fair to say these strikes have affected nearly everyone in the country in some way. And here's something else. Right now, support for the labor movement is nearly the highest it's been in 60 years. COVID made things very, very clear to people. The corporate elite in many cases treated all of us, no matter which worker it was, as disposable, not just as worthless or a line item, but literally disposable, not caring if we lived or died. So that set up a real clear line of which

side are you on here? Who is on your side and who is working against you? Sarah Nelson is the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, and she saw this coming. 30 days since much of the federal government shut down over the president's insistence that Congress fund a border wall. In January 2019, the U.S. government was actually closed for business. It had been shut for 30 days, the longest government shutdown in American history. About 800,000 federal employees are still going without pay and there is no end in sight. I do live paycheck to paycheck. We've used whatever we had in our bank account to pay our last mortgage payment and our last car payment. People can't survive like this. This is America.

Something's wrong here. Sarah Nelson agreed. And she had a pretty clear idea of who could right that wrong. What is the labor movement waiting for? End this shutdown with a general strike. At a union gathering, Sarah called for a general strike, which is basically when people across industries strike together and demand change. When we called for that, the electricity in the room was extraordinary.

People were so excited. Our phone was ringing off the hook. Everybody wanted to know about this. A few days later, just shy of 40 years after Reagan broke the strike, air traffic controllers on the East Coast stayed home, grounding flights. Hours later, President Trump and Congress agreed to reopen the government. We're fighting back. Finally. It's taken that long since Ronald Reagan set the tone to crush unions. It wasn't an accident that the most radical call for labor unity in decades came from

the head of the Flight Attendants Union, because workers in the airlines have been on the front lines of American organizing for generations. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And I'm Ramteen Adab-Louie. On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we turn an eye to the sky to see how American unions took flight. Hello, this is Paulina from Toronto, Canada, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Right as President Reagan was firing air traffic controllers, on the other side of the country, one woman looked around, and instead of running away from her union, she doubled down. Victoria Frankovich, president of the TWA Flight Attendance Union.

And she helped set in motion a chain of events that brought us the unions of today. We are truly the strike of the 80s. The issue is the bigger question of whether a corporate raider can use deregulation as an excuse to abuse the discrimination laws, safety laws and the labor laws. Vicky Frankovich was in a world that I am guessing she felt like she was rowing with the current of history to lead to progressive social change. Now, if you were thinking, if only there was a trained historian who was a former flight attendant and knew all this history, and as a kid saw Vicky Frankovich, that union president, as a hero, and knew Sarah Nelson personally, the one who called for the general strike. Yeah, I know, that sounds like an impossible person. I get it. But never say never.

My name is Ryan Murphy. Former flight attendant, former union rep, current labor historian, and associate professor of women's gender and sexuality studies at Earlham College. Plus all those other things I mentioned. I'm the author of the book, Deregulating Desire, Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice.

That's fascinating because you don't see, I talk to a lot of academics and have hundreds of these interviews, and you rarely find people who actually are studying thing that they once worked in. I would have loved to stay in the airline industry and I still miss it. I just couldn't afford it. So yeah, Ryan's been there. And he says the main reason the airline industry can tell us so much about the state of American labor is that such a big cross-section of people are in it. So you have highly scaled workers like airline pilots who study for a decade. You have flight attendants. And then you have jobs that would be understood as a more conventional service job. People who repair the airplanes, people who clean the airplanes,

this kind of blue collar world of aircraft mechanics. So there's no way to talk separately about, wait, is this a workforce that's sort of divided by immigration or by race or by skill? It's divided by every single one of those things. Plus, the airline industry and airline unions have always dealt with things that people in any job deal with, but to an extreme. Work keeps you away from home, away from your community, doing work that is physically taxing with people that you don't know, but that you also might build interesting bonds with. What unions did in the airline industry is they took stigmatized jobs and they turned them into jobs that you could use to build a safe, middle class and secure life,

regardless of what people said about you. At his house in Indiana, Ryan's walls are covered in bright frame vintage airline ads. Next to his couch, a row of 1970s airplane seats from a now-defunct airline. Airlines, airline history, and labor organizers like Vicky Frankovich are still his thing. Yeah. So Vicky Frankovich's story in the airline industry starts in California, in Los Angeles, in the late 1960s when she was hired as a young white woman in her 20s. And Vicky Frankovich was part of a world in rapid social change. You know, the women's liberation movement was in an upsurge.

The queer, transgender, gay liberation, the Chicano movement was bubbling up at the University of California. All of these kind of topics are rising to the fore. Even in the airline industry, feminist flight attendant unions had organized against rules which said flight attendants couldn't be above a certain age, couldn't be above a certain weight, couldn't be married. Her world was breaking all of those barriers down. And so Victoria Frankovich, I think, imagined that that's what she was going to do is go to TWA, make change. And so she becomes a union activist in the 70s. Their union is very much on the up and up. They got an excellent new contract in 1978, another excellent new contract in 1983. And Victoria Frankovich actually runs for office, wanting to push her union to assert for even better contracts. In the political context of the moment, in the mid-1980s. Yes. What is she facing? She had a person who both the national

media and rank-and-file workers saw as her antithesis or her nemesis, which was a man named Carl Icahn. Carl Icahn has become something of a folk hero on Wall Street, a financial maverick who fully appreciates the value of a free market. Part of my values is to make money, and I can't change my values. I mean, some people love art, you know, love to paint. If a great painter loves to paint, well, you can't, what do you do, criticize him because he likes to paint? Well, hell, I was born up with my values to make money. This is Icahn in a 1985 PBS interview. A few months later, in a corporate takeover, he became the new chairman of the financially struggling TWA Airlines, where Vicky Frankovich headed up the flight attendants union. cast labor concessions from its workforces, drastically reduce its labor costs,

and in turn, drastically up its profit margins. And then you could take those margins and return the money to investors who had in fact financed Icahn's effort to buy TWA. This company undoubtedly would have been bankrupt if I hadn't come along, borrowed the money, and saved the damn thing, okay? This is a strategy of what popular culture would have called a corporate raider in the 1980s.

Somebody who used these high-risk, high-interest loans called junk bonds to take control of corporations, lower their labor costs, and then return the surplus to other wealthy people. I'm not going to let the people who loan me money down. I'm not going to let my shareholders down. I being one of the principal shareholders, I don't want to let myself down. So what I'm saying is that I'm not going to sit here and see TWA bleed to death. So he becomes the owner. Yep. And Vicky, so it makes sense why people would have seen them as arch enemies here because vicky is and and the union are pushing for a better contract yes even though they've had success in the past and carl icon is like nope we're not we're not only gonna stop that ask we're gonna try to roll back some of what you've gotten in the past so that we can increase

the profit margins so um you talk a little bit about the mood around unions at that time, because I want to get a sense of like who will might win this battle given the mood and where things are going at that point in the 80s. Yeah, well, the way I would think of Carl Icahn is rowing in the opposite historical current as Vicky Frankovich, him saying, we've seen a lot of social change in the United States since the 1960s. And because there had been a big recession, big period of inflation in the 1970s. And what Icahn was able to say is, we need to get back to basics and figure out what made the American economy strong. And it's not Vicky Frankovich, right? He wasn't the only person who was saying that.

And so this all peaks in late 1980 and 1981 when the air traffic controllers went on strike. Now, we know how that played out. 11,000 union men fired for striking. It sent shockwaves across unions in the country. Often when we talk about the history of unions, we imagine unions as being a thing for white men who work in heavy industry, who have conventional American values and want to be breadwinners for their family. And so air traffic controllers sort of fit that bill. Now, all of a sudden, the president of the United States declares war on these conservative

white men through their unions. And if the government is willing to attack that kind of worker, they're probably going to be willing to attack every kind of worker. What I think makes it stand out is that these were white men, almost overwhelmingly, who were considered to be skilled workers, who in today's dollars made over $100,000 a year, whose union endorsed Ronald Reagan for the 1980 election. All that meant nothing once they walked out on strike because Reagan fired them. This is a part of the story that I had not ever really heard teased out so essentially reagan by taking this action is attacking his constituents some of his own constituents that's how much she believed in the pushing against this current of history that was moving

towards the more unions more kind of progressive and the fact that it was popular even among, let's say, Republican voters at that time, it was a very bold move by Reagan. Yeah. The cultural landscape Vicky Frankovich was working in, the landscape when Carl Icahn took over TWA, was changing. Unions were in decline. And one of Icahn's first moves as chairman of TWA was to demand givebacks from his workers. The company was losing money and he

wanted to reduce labor costs to stay competitive with other cheaper airlines. Icahn basically said to the flight attendants, you know those great contracts and fat paychecks the union negotiated for and won in the 70s and 80s? Well, there's a new guy in charge now. We need that money. Time to give a bunch of it back. He basically wanted to cut pay and increase hours. He argued that flight attendants aren't breadwinners. He said that they don't have family responsibilities like the men do. If you need money, your husband is going to give you money. That's always what the American economy is dependent on. Icahn's boldness is what really stands out. Ryan says Icahn made these comments

during contract negotiations. Icahn, for his part, denies having made sexist comments. But if Icahn was bold, Vicky Frankovich was bold too. I think Carl Icahn underrated this workforce, both in our willingness to resist his demands and in our willingness to continue this struggle. On March 7th, 1986, she and the flight attendants walked out on strike. Good evening from CBS News. This is Newsbreak. About half of TWA's flights were flying on the second day of a strike by flight attendants. The flight attendants brought their fight to the front gates of Carl Icahn's estate in Bedford, New York. And their strike was very theatrical on the picket line. They had always Carl Icahn saying, you're not breadwinners. So they, for example,

activists would buy loaves and loaves and loaves of white bread and deliver it every time Carl Icahn was seen in person. We asked Carl Icahn if he could live on $105 a week. I couldn't, but these girls do. Oh, okay. Well, you just said a girl. Okay.

They're 18-year-old people. They had, at least lore, a couple people had told me this, that I think in St. Louis, they had a Carl Icon weenie roast. So you can leave out in the open what you think the imagery of that is.

So, in other words, theatrical. This is not just sort of a like, you know, we deserve rights too. It's like, no, we're going to have a, like a, a bratwurst barbecue that's celebrating the CEO. So yeah. And, and in the meantime, don't fire all of us. Vicky Frankovich, as union head, made her way onto news programs to sound the alarm that ICON's demands for rollbacks from flight attendants were wrong. I can only conclude that he believes that, as he said to me in conversations, we are second incomes, that we are women who in fact he did not anticipate would strike, that we are not breadwinners, and that, in fact, he could get that money from us. But while the flight attendants were on strike, TWA started hiring replacements.

Paying them less than half of the unionized flight attendant wages and putting them to work, crossing TWA flight attendants' picket lines and taking their jobs. In the end, the flight attendants couldn't keep up. Three months later, they called off their strike and said that they were willing to go back to work for the last, best, and final offer that put flight attendants at the lower pay level than anyone else. This is so much more dramatic than I expected at the beginning of this story where it went. What do you think the ultimate outcome of Vicky and the other attendants' effort was here? I mean, it really depends who you are. For those of us as a young man in 1986, I was

tiny. I was an 11-year-old, but I had come from a background where unions were present. Vicky Frankovich, I knew her name as an 11-year-old. She was one of my heroes. Wow. And so I think Vicky Frankovich left a little trail of breadcrumbs in a culture that was working against her that you could still imagine unions being up to fight the good fight. Now, what's the main message for an average person who was my age was, oh my God, don't ever join a union or don't go on strike because you're going to lose everything. And so for a generation, I think this and hundreds of other strikes where workers were unsuccessful

taught younger workers to stay away, right? Don't join the movement because this is going to hurt you. Vicky went on to become a full-time union activist. And those breadcrumbs she dropped, a decade later people picked them up and used their unions to fight for broader social change. That's coming up. This is Brendan Barlow from Kansas City, Missouri. And you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Hey there, it's Ramtin. Before we get back to the show, we here at ThruLine want to shout out our ThruLine Plus supporters and anyone listening who currently donates to public media.

Thank you so much. You are actually making a real difference and your financial support is what makes our work possible. And if you're listening and haven't yet made the leap to be a supporter, Giving Tuesday is an international day of giving and it's coming up next week. It's the perfect reason to finally join ThruLine Plus to hear our episodes sponsor free and get access to our monthly behind the scenes bonus episodes. Or you can also make a tax deductible donation to your local NPR station or even the NPR network. There are a lot of ways to give. But what really matters is that you're a part of the community of listeners who makes our journalism possible.

We cannot do it without you, and your support makes sure everyone can listen. You can give today at donate.npr.org slash ThruLine, or explore NPR Plus at plus.npr.org. And thank you. In June 1997, Stan Kino, a flight attendant and member of the Association of Flight Attendants, headed to San Francisco's Gay Pride Parade like he did every year. Shirtless women on motorcycles, they called themselves Dykes on Bikes, led the parade. Behind them rode a group of men on bicycles known as Mikes on Bikes. I remember it was a sunny, warm day and I remember one real quick moment where I saw the face of a fellow crew member that I had flown with a couple days before. And his face disappeared quickly when we saw him.

And I think because he was a bit afraid of being identified. And that's how things were in those days. It was a controversial issue that we were bringing forward. Stan was there along with other flight attendants in his union, all wearing matching green shirts to pressure their employer, United Airlines. San Francisco had passed an ordinance which said that if a company wanted a contract with the city, benefits it offered to married couples had to also be offered to people with domestic partners as well, which at the time were many queer couples.

But United had resisted. They said, we're a nationwide business, we shouldn't have to follow local laws. were many queer couples. But United had resisted. They said, we're a nationwide business. We shouldn't have to follow local laws. United had a float in the parade. Stan was there to protest. I felt ragamuffin. Our signs were homemade.

It was grassroots on many levels for us. In the years since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and Carl Icahn had taken on Vicky Frankovich at TWA, union power had diminished. But people like Stan were transforming how people thought about unions and how unions can be a tool for pushing civil rights, like fighting for domestic partner benefits. Over the day, Stan and flight flight attendants in green shirts passed out 10,000 flyers that read, Is United Really Gay Friendly? On that flyer, it said, if you agree with the points we are making and you want to speak to United, then this is the world headquarters numbers that you can call and list your egregious issues with this.

And so that happened. And I think they were overwhelmed with phone calls at world headquarters in Chicago the next day. So Stan Kino was my mentor in the communications shop at Association of Flight Attendants Local 11. He started as a very young man for Pan Am in 1973. Stans descended from Japanese immigrants. So he came of age as a boy in a time of a very insular and anti-immigrant American culture.

Flying for Pan Am was a place where his difference, being a young bilingual and then realizing that he was gay, man, Pan Am, this celebrated, iconic American airline could use his skills because it had a hub in Tokyo. His career, though, was really upended in the early and mid 1980s during the AIDS pandemic. So Stan was hired in a cohort that would have had about seven or eight, I think, men in it. And by the time Stan became my mentor in 1999, I think he was the only one or maybe one of two men left alive in that cohort because everyone else had passed away from AIDS. And so for him, a union job was most important because he needed both the flexibility that union work rules give you and the money that union benefits give you to

take time off work and to care for his friends as they were dying. And so that experience, I think, transformed him. But what's interesting is he didn't have a domestic partner. The two people who ran the campaign for the flight attendants in San Francisco, both of them were single. And so they were leading the charge for like the partner struggle for lovers, but they didn't have that category in their life. A few weeks after first passing out those flyers at the Pride Parade, they ratcheted things up. 450 of us showed up downtown in front of the ticket office. It was dramatic. People rallied, called for a boycott of United, cut up frequent flyer cards, and entered United's ticket office. City grassroots activists blocked the entrance. They refused to leave and were arrested. And it still brings a little bit of a choking feeling because we stood across the street and watched the people supporting us getting arrested for us.

What Stan taught me is that use the toolkit, pick up the breadcrumbs that activists before you led, get a few more resources that a few more of your coworkers could use because next time around, it's going to be about you. This time it really wasn't about him, but next time it will be. But one element of this is really interesting is that most people may not associate unions as a part of trying to make advances in civil rights. Right. You know, we generally associate it with fighting for wages

or other benefits that improve material needs of the individual. But this has to do with a bigger thing, which is actual rights. Is there a history of this? The history with a capital H of unions is very different than the history with a small h of unions. And what I mean by that is the history that we write down of unions is one that tells us that they're primarily something that fights for economic issues so that working class men who we often imagine to be white can be equal to middle class and upper class men who we also often imagine to be white. And that's certainly part of labor history. There were segregated unions who were viciously anti-immigrant and viciously racist in both the 19th and the 20th century.

Who really suffered were the immigrant workers, the Black workers who were working in the service economy and who were beyond the purview of the scope of most unions at the time. But just as likely, right, are people to use people on the margin to use labor activism to fight specifically for rights. I'm just thinking about in the summer of 1866 in Jackson, Mississippi, black women who worked in the laundry industry went on strike. These are people who were months out of enslavement, okay? And they stopped doing the laundry for the city of Jackson, Mississippi. People who rose up who had literally been considered human property, right? Then let's fast forward. 1903, Oxnard, California, farm workers go on strike against the agricultural industry and extract at least some concessions for this work

that's often highly stigmatized for migrant farm workers. In all of those cases, those union activists or labor activists were fighting against gender stereotypes, racial stereotypes, class oppression, and using their union as being on the vanguard of social change. Should we not forget that Martin Luther King is killed doing solidarity for the sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, who were a group of entirely Black men fighting for their dignity. What is the slogan of their strike? It's not give me a raise. It's not make garbage trucks safer to drive. What is the slogan? It's I am a man. I should be seen as a human being, not as a racialized body that is there to take your trash away from your house.

That was a fight about Blackness. That was a fight about being a full human being. Yeah, it got Black men who worked as sanitation workers a raise. That wasn't the point of the strike. For people on the margin, there's always been the idea that unions are one of many tools in a toolkit that can bring you into the center. Now, in the airline industry, that's specifically complicated because of how stigmatized airline work had always been for sexual reasons. Especially for flight crew, because of the idea that you're gone for months and weeks at a time on overseas trips, and you're not living at home in a conventional nuclear family. I mean, I'll just say it personally.

So often people, as a young gay man in my 20s, it's the AIDS era, the first thing they would imply when I would tell them that I was a flight attendant was to ask in a maybe somewhat indirect way about the spiciness of my sex life, which I can handle. I'm like, whatever. I'm not a very sensitive person. But I'm like, I wish I had enough time on my layovers and enough money to have the spicy sex life that you imagine when really what I do on most of my layovers is sleep to repair my body. And the union was a place that a lot of people could kind of complain about that, but also acknowledge that we live on a sexual margin because of the work that we do.

Was there tension there within unions over time, this tension between what you spelled out, it's like what we generally like to think about unions doing is just pushing for economic equality and then stepping out and making stands and also trying to push forward these other issues like having equality or other things. I imagine

that also was probably a source of tension because that's a source of tension in the country. Wouldn't it be a source of tension within the unions? It's a source of tension in any community on the margin, in the queer community, in any community of color, right? You have to decide like, wait, are we going to fight for the people that are the most close to the center of culture among us

because that's going to ruffle the fewest feathers? Or are we going to go full throttle and just say like, there's diversity within our community and we have to represent all of it? So yes, the most represented people in the labor movement were primarily white men who worked in the heavy industrial fields, steel workers, automobile workers, et cetera, et cetera. So back to Stan, how did he navigate this

and what kind of advocacy did he do as he got more involved in the union in the 1990s? I think for him, the gay activist movement had been so both traumatized and transformed by the AIDS crisis that he was able to be a union activist who actually took the current of that movement outside of work and used it to push the whole movement forward. So queer people were so committed to the fundamental dignity of people with AIDS. And so we actually didn't have significant backlash within our part of the labor movement. Amidst all the protests, arrests, and calls for a boycott, United was busy fighting the San Francisco law in court. They sued the city in an attempt to have the anti-discrimination law invalidated.

Eventually, a judge took the airline's side. That could have been the end of things. But then, something totally unexpected happened. United turned around and said, we will grant domestic partner benefits to our employees. At first, I didn't believe it. United announced that they'd provide full domestic partner benefits, including health insurance and bereavement leave, to same-sex partners of all employees worldwide. Days later, other airlines followed suit and domestic partner benefits became the standard throughout the airline industry and other industries, too. Today, Stan is still flying, still working regular shifts from L.A. to Australia and still a member of his union.

Now he's like Mr. Relevant, right? And then all of a sudden he's like someone who's done LGBT and labor activism. So a lot of like progressive Gen Z people are like, oh, yeah, that must be just the natural thing. But I think his, again, being someone who's fighting, has fought for queer stuff, HIV stuff, labor stuff, and still is doing it as now a much older adult while still doing the job that unions made good enough that he could afford to keep. I have to be honest, Ryan. This is calling into question a lot of the assumptions I made about unions in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, that they were so decimated that they were playing just irrelevant. But in the example of the airline industry being one example of this, that's not the case.

It's a much more complex, nuanced story than I think I assumed and I think many other people assume. Yeah, I think that that's right. And I think that, again, because often the people who tell the story are journalists and academics that come from the middle class and who don't have personal and family experience with the nuances and the complexities of this struggle, right? But what happened in academia and mainstream journalism in the 1990s and after is this kind of shift to the idea that like the free market at the end of the day is the best route all of us have into living a full life.

Or as President Ronald Reagan, the man who fired all those air traffic controllers, put it, it's the magic of the marketplace. A free market society is the route to the best life for all of us. But eventually, people look around and say, actually, this free market existence isn't cutting it. And unions come roaring back. That's coming up. This is David Childs from Salt Lake City, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. When Sarah Nelson became the head of the Flight Attendants Union in 2014, she came at it in a specific way. I can't be the kind of president that the flight attendants need me to be if I'm not fighting for everyone else. When we negotiated our first contract in

1946, we had an eight-hour day in it. and that's because the rest of the working class had been fighting for that eight-hour day and even dying for that eight-hour day for 80 years already. Sarah had looked around and seen how only working an eight-hour day and making ends meet was becoming less and less realistic. rising inequality, corporations outsourcing jobs while demanding longer hours from people, and turning workers into independent contractors, putting them outside the scope of labor laws. So Sarah pushed to build connections across labor groups and across other social justice causes, hoping to unite people as a larger entity. For her, movements like Black Lives Matter are intertwined with fights for better contracts. On any given day, she can be seen marching and chanting at a rally with a different union. The United Mine Workers of America, teachers and the nurses, the UIW, the Teamsters with UPS, the writers and the actors and the pilots.

She says across industries, people are facing what flight attendants have faced for years. It is normal to be a union member. And in my industry, it is normal to have a contract. And what they did, though, after 9-11 was use bankruptcies to terminate our pensions, to increase our productivity, make us work harder for less, to shift the cost of health care to us, and to cut our pay. Wall Street may have thought that they redefined the value of all these jobs and that they see as a line item, but these are real people. And something is clear. People have had enough.

She and I were both based together in United's Boston flight attendant base for a short amount of time. This is labor historian Ryan Murphy again. She was a person who I felt like, okay, someone else gets it. Like, I was another young person that was, like, kind of crazy about unions. But that other people that I worked with, I think they liked me, but they made fun of me. Like, all other gay men that I worked with called me Norma Rae. They called me Karen Silkwood.

All of these different sort of famous women labor activists to sort of play with me as like someone who both is sort of cute in how I think about unions, but like something kind of retro and campy rather than relevant to social change. And then Sarah was in the local and I was like, see everybody? Like, I'm not the only one that cares about unions. But like in the culture of the late 1990s, no one cared about any of it.

It was just sort of like, oh, wow, that's a sort of like quaint like thing that these like flight attendants who must get sick of being abused by their passengers and are now like getting angry and fighting back to this like anachronistic tool that is their union. But then culture has just changed. And so Sarah Nelson has become a person who has been out there on this stump, standing up for this whole new generation of workers in this new upsurge. So she made connections across industries, it sounds like. This elevates the fight to even a new level. Yeah, because there was no such thing as not making connections when you're a flight

attendant, right? I mean, there was no such thing as Vicky Frankovich being just a union activist. Like, the Women's Liberation Movement is what made it possible for Vicky Frankovich to work in the airline industry. The LGBTQ movement is what made it possible for me to work in the airline industry. The civil rights movement is what made it possible for my colleague, Dante Harris, another United Flight attendant, to work in the airline industry. And so there wasn't a way for Sarah to just be like,

okay, well, we're just gonna have like a union-only thing here that doesn't care about other struggles. It's just that Sarah's longstanding practice of building alliances is now broadly relevant. Ryan thinks we were always gonna get to this point because somewhere along the line, the imbalance just got too big and people started paying attention. It became normal to everyone that the CEO makes 400 times the salary of an ordinary worker.

It became commonplace that you have to work at least two full-time jobs to support a family. And at some point, corporations just hit a wall where they had extracted so much from people, people working 60 hours a week but still being counted as working part-time jobs. People didn't have any more to give. And then the pandemic happened. So you have at the Amazon warehouse, people who are contracting COVID and dying of COVID, all while working in Amazon so other people could stay at home and have all their supplies delivered. And while Jeff Bezos shot into outer space on a rocket,

people who were already barely being able to make ends meet saw that and were like, something has got to give. In 2019, Sarah Nelson had made headlines when she called for workers across industries to band together in a general strike. Looking back, it seemed prescient. If you'd have said general strike in the 1990s, people would have just been like, did you just buy some socialist newspaper off the street corner and you have absolutely no kind of connection to broadly what people are thinking in the pop culture? Now people are starting to,

young people are like, you know what we need? We need like a general strike. In 2022, Americans' approval of unions topped 70%, its highest point on record since 1965. And this year, the number of strikes and union actions has steadily climbed. More people are having disputes and winning disputes. They are not ending up in a disaster. The Teamsters fought an excellent campaign at UPS and got rid of some incredibly unfair policies like multi-tier wage systems,

where the later you start, the lower your wages can ever be over the course of your life. That is just utterly unfair. And the Teamsters were able to get rid of that. You see all these different workers at Starbucks. I think, what are we up to? 300 now? That's only a small amount of Starbucks, but that's 300 Starbucks that in the 1990s you would, I was the book Starbucks by Risa in the 1990s. The idea that you would have tried to start a union was absolutely laughable. And so that, so that there's no question that things that we are in a time of change. Another fascinating element of this that I'm often just like puzzled by trying to figure out in my brain is, is it possible for unions to continue having success

when we live in a economic system that incentivizes companies to do the most for the cheapest amount possible? How is it possible for unions to continue having victories under these circumstances within this context? I think the most important thing to understand is that market forces are cultural forms. In other words, our culture produces an idea that we call market forces. I'll give you an example. Harvard University. In 2016, Harvard University's cafeteria workers went on strike over wages and benefits. At the time, Harvard's endowment was $35 billion. There is no economic reason why Harvard University can't meet the needs of its cafeteria workers and flourish. But there is the cultural understanding that recent immigrants,

that older Black women, that when they go to work at a university, they go to work in low-wage jobs. That's a cultural assumption. And so the quote-unquote market value of their labor is low. These days, Harvard's endowment is over $50 billion. For their part, they've said they pay their cafeteria workers higher wages than what other schools offer. The union ratified a new contract in 2021.

Harvard is in absolutely no danger of going out of business. I absolutely promise you that if the cafeteria workers at Harvard Law School get a 15% raise, that all of the lawyers who are working on all sorts of the sides of our cultural debates over Donald Trump or whatever, that their alma mater is going to go poof into history because of cafeteria workers. It is only a cultural value that imagines that to be the case. In the writer's strike, we were being told that, oh my goodness, artificial intelligence is going to write the script of every TV show ever again. And thus, that every single writer must work for a pittance because the AI is here to take

your job and there is nothing you can do. That is false. We can decide as a culture that people are beautiful and creative and that we are going to have people participate in the creation of popular culture. And it is only tech leaders riding into outer space on their rockets that are here to tell us that only AI will make the next version of Succession or whatever the show is going to be. It's funny because you said AI too, and it made me think of the quote from Terminator

2, there's no fate but what we make. And this idea that essentially the story we tell ourselves about ourselves will then drive these things we call market forces or the invisible hand or the story that we tell ourselves about jobs, about value of particular kinds of identities, etc. And I think that's a really interesting way to look at it, because I think there's also been this narrative over the last, like, at least for me, the last 20 years, 15, 20 years I've worked in a job, is that unions aren't going to get the job done for you. This is the general narrative, that they are a relic of the past, and they're not actually going to improve your material reality. Those ideas were very common 15 or 20 years ago.

The idea that, oh, goodness, yes, work might be a problem. But if I speak up and join a union, there'll be some horrible disaster and then we'll lose our jobs. Part of the reason that people were having that conversation is because a certain group of us who grew up in Generation X saw these huge attacks happening on unions in the 1980s. And so when I went into the workplace in the 1990s, it felt like, okay, I want things to be better, but certainly the risk of joining a union seems like too much to take. But now you have Gen Z folks who came of age after the turn of the millennium.

And all of the fighting about unions in the past is just not a story that they have. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randab Del Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode

was produced by me. And me. And Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Peter Balanon Rosen. Thomas Liu. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode

was done by Kevin Vogel. Thanks also to Joseph McCartan, Johannes Dergi, Jade Ernst, Claudia Liz Schultz, and Anya Grunman. The episode was mixed by Maggie Luther. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.