When Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, started to emerge as the most dynamic labor leader in years, issuing calls to arms for workers all over the country, it was newsworthy. The new face of the labor movement was…a flight attendant? Appearing on television and on picket lines, often dressed in her United Airlines uniform, Nelson was not exactly what most people thought of when they imagined a militant union leader.
But, as I learned while researching my new book, The Great Stewardess Rebellion, flight attendants have been at the forefront of the labor movement for decades. Back in the 1960s and 70s, flight attendants used their unions to make huge change in their workplace, including eliminating the “no marriage” rule (until the mid-1960s, flight attendants were fired when they wed) and the age limits (most airlines fired flight attendants at 32). These changes had a wider impact, too, opening doors for women workers across the United States in all sorts of industries. And flight attendants have been at the vanguard of the labor movement ever since. In 1993, when almost 21,000 American Airlines flight attendants went on strike, TIME and others described them as the new face of labor.
Today, flight attendants are still leading the way. In the United States, they are virtually all unionized, and have been for more than half a century. Except at Delta Airlines. But that might be about to change.
Right now there’s a major union drive going on to bring the flight attendants at the country’s second-largest airline into AFA, which currently has around 50,000 members. About 24,000 flight attendants work for Delta, a huge group of workers. Delta has been fighting the drive with all it’s got—the company makes no secret of its distaste for unions—but for possibly the first time,…