The flight attendant profession fought an uphill battle as a historically underserved career. The collective power of unionizing made it possible for flight attendants across the country to access fair compensation and representation.
Sara Nelson
International President, Association of Flight Attendants-CWA
Our profession began on May 15, 1930, when the first commercial flight with flight attendants left San Francisco for Chicago. But it would take decades of organizing and bargaining to turn the job into a career.
For decades, airlines enforced outrageous rules. We had to step on a scale at the start of the shift and meet strict appearance standards. We were terminated for getting married or having a baby, and our jobs ended the day we turned 32. So, we organized one airline and one contract at a time until we made our job a career.
Early pilots were paid by the mile flown. But as planes got faster, airlines tried to shift to hourly pay, and union organizing in aviation was born. At every step along the way, airlines have worked to squeeze workers for every productivity gain possible. At every step, we would have been at their mercy without the collective power in our unions.
A history of underrepresentation
Flight attendants today are still fighting to be paid for time with passengers, during boarding and deplaning at many airlines. We must end the practice of paying regional flight attendants as much as 45% less than mainline workers earn, and it’s not a fight that will happen just one contract at a time. At the same time, we’re working to protect the benefits we’ve negotiated over decades, including health coverage and retirement that management tries to erode at every new contract negotiation.
Some of our struggles — like getting paid during boarding — sound outrageous to most Americans. And they are. But the truth is that the American economy runs on stolen labor.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), interns are exploited under the outlandish premise that someone working for free is the “primary beneficiary” of the arrangement. The FLSA also exempts millions of employees who earn a “salary” as low as $35,568 from minimum wage and overtime, allowing employers to steal their labor. Lax rules allow companies to classify everyone from app-based drivers to construction workers as “independent contractors” to exploit both our labor. Employers in food service steal billions of dollars a year from workers. Creative workers are asked to provide work in exchange for “exposure” rather than a paycheck. Americans — overwhelmingly women — perform a trillion dollars per year in unpaid care work. Incarcerated Americans are forced to work for little to no wage, allowing both private companies and public agencies to engage in extreme exploitation. And flight attendants and other airline workers are completely exempted from the already inadequate protections of the FLSA. That’s why it’s especially important to have unions for collective bargaining that locks in protections in a contract.
Paving an equitable future
The American economy has been built on unpaid labor since the earliest days. Each time we move the ball forward to close one window for exploitation, corporate America finds new ways to extract value without compensating us. The story of the flight attendant career may look different superficially, but it’s the same core battle fought across American history by coal miners, garment workers, electricians, teachers … It’s the fight for a fair share of the value we create and dignity in our workplaces.
Workers have only succeeded when we found solidarity and strength to build the unions that give us a vehicle to get a fair return for our work. It’s really the only way to make good on the promise of a country built “of, by, and for the people” with “liberty and justice for all.” When you board our planes, we all fly safely with the spirit of doing something extraordinary together — no matter where you came from, how you got there, or how much your ticket cost. That togetherness is a metaphor for the solidarity it took for unions to build careers in aviation too.
