“I have to tell you, after 25 years of doing this work, praying like hell that people would wake up to their power, this union is the answer to my prayers!” Sara Nelson, head of the flight attendants’ union, told a crowd at a Amazon Labor Union event.
In those years, nobody could make a career out of being a stewardess. Airlines had age limits: Tucker, who was hired at the age of twenty, had to agree to quit when she turned thirty-two. Stewardesses were prohibited from marrying, and there were strict rules dictating how they could look, which included bans on braces and hair dye, and a requirement that stewardesses wear nail polish.
After high school, Nelson went to Principia College, a small liberal-arts school founded by a Christian Scientist, in southwestern Illinois. Nelson was “so bubbly” and “very, very passionate about everything,” Caviness, her best friend, recalled. Nelson had grown up singing in a children’s choir that her mother founded, and at Principia she starred as Maria in a production of “West Side Story.” “Everyone was drawn to her,” Caviness said.
She also devoted a lot of time to union work. By 2001, she was the vice-president of her local council, and on September 11th she was scheduled to attend a union training event in Chicago. She took an overnight flight from the West Coast, landing at around 5:30that day at O’Hare Airport, and then went straight to the nearby Hilton Hotel.
A few months later, United decided to furlough another twenty-three hundred flight attendants. Nelson still remembers her boss at the union calling her into his office to tell her the news. “In that moment, it was just, like, ‘You know, I can’t take any more,’ ” Nelson said. “So I told him, ‘I just need a minute to cry.’ And I did. I really cried. Then, after about a minute, something clicked in me. And I just thought, ‘O.K., well, this is it. This is the moment that I’m committing.
The air-transportation industry has one of the highest rates of unionization of any private-sector industry in the U.S. At three of the four major carriers—United, American, and Southwest—more than eighty per cent of workers belong to a union. When the A.F.A. was founded, in 1945, its ranks were all white and all female. According to a recent census, about a quarter of the union’s members are male, and nearly forty per cent are nonwhite.
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