Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, had a big year in 2020. Fighting for her union members in a moment of unprecedented crisis as COVID shut down the airline industry, Nelson was thrust into the national spotlight like never before, and the work continues.
The union leader, increasingly seen as a major figure on the left and one with sway in Washington, spoke to Blue Tent at the end of October with the election looming.
What follows is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
What challenges do you see for labor organizers heading into another year of COVID, and how should labor organizers and progressives work together?
The challenge is that everyone’s out of work. No matter what, no matter if Trump wins again or Biden wins, it’s going to be an uphill battle.
People want to be a part of the winning team. So you have to figure out what your strategy is to win improvements for people, whether that’s locally, nationally, whatever it is. And you can’t ask people to keep coming out over and over without a plan to actually win.
That has to be a coordinated strategy—and it has to be well-defined. You have to understand where you have your leverage to get those wins.
For example, you know, stopping Republicans from proposing an additional $400 plus jobless benefit is not a win for the $600. You got zero.
So it’s about priorities.
Yeah. It’s not random. You have to fully define what’s at stake and it has to mean something to people. If you’re not actually talking to the people and instead just talking to Congress and picking a side—a political side—you’re going to lose. But if you pick the side of the workers, you win every time there’s a difference.
There’s a distinction between taking a political side and picking a side of the workers.
Which is itself a political decision, right?
I just see it as practical and where we have failed. Whether that’s with the unions or the environmental groups or whoever this is.
We can’t lay out an ideological map and choose a particular party that we think is going to best support that. This is why people get so confused in elections, because they think it’s all or nothing with a particular candidate and they’re putting all their focus on that—as opposed to stepping back and understanding that if you actually are listening to and reflecting the needs of the electorate, the needs of working people across this country, you’re going to build something that wins and you’re gonna win no matter who is in office.
Speaking of winning, how aggressive do you think unions should be in threatening to strike and in striking? I’m thinking of the wildcat stuff that we’ve seen from the teachers unions. Do you think that’s an effective tactic?
Striking is a tactic. And it’s the most important tactic that labor has. But it doesn’t always necessarily have to look the same.
Our union created a strike tactic that is impossible to defend against because we don’t announce when and where we’re going to strike. And so it’s impossible to defend against that. Fundamentally, even though the strike is the tactic, to strike is labor’s only leverage.
It’s our only real leverage. So why do you strike or not? You have to be ready to put forward a credible strike at any time.
Unions have to be willing to say the word strike and plan for one. And their demands may be different. The urgency may be different.
But if you are not building that kind of collective power at all times and ready to act at any given time, situations can change. Just like right now—in January, I’m planning to negotiate the best contracts ever ... in the middle of a crisis.
And in either case, it’s our labor that matters. Whether that was creating all those profits or continuing to operate in the middle of a crisis. In either case, the strike is our only real leverage.
I don’t think it exists as a union without being able to say the word “strike” and understand that that is your ultimate leverage.
What is the one thing that labor unions and other progressive groups can do to form lasting coalitions together?
The biggest problem is that the labor movement has dwindled to almost nothing. But if we were actually, you know, at 30, 40%, like we were back in the day when labor was actually driving a lot of economic policy for the country? That kind of power, that is when we have the best economic policy, when the vast majority of people profited in an extreme. The most number of people had the greatest economic share of the economy. And what was missing from that?
And the reason that the Chamber of Commerce was able to chip away at unions is because we did not do enough to address the issues of sexism and racism and to understand that immigrants rights are central to building up unions as well as protecting workers rights. That’s how our unions were defeated initially.
The roots of the United Mine Workers were immigrants that were exploited. And it wasn’t until you joined the union that you built that into a good job. And so we think as a labor movement that we’re in a club, and in our club, we’re going to attract people to be a part of a club where, if you join, you get health insurance.
Not necessarily true, but we approach this as, you join a union, you get to have things. And if you don’t, too bad. The labor movement will continue to wither away.
Can you talk about a group that is making the correct moves here?
Look to Sunrise, they really have it right. Not only are they using the energy of youth, but the generation that has it worse than their parents for the first time and understands that there has to be collective action to make things better.
Sunrise also has made central to their efforts supporting and building up unions and making alliances that have been defined by those who want to keep power and control and exploit that division. From talking to each other.
When Sunrise got out on the tracks with miners in Kentucky, people said, wait, wait. Stereotypically, you think that that’s not a common alliance. But it’s the most natural alliance. And so you’ve got to have these ideas and movements that are driven by people who understand them and understand the policy.
There has to be a direct coordination with unions because where we have the power to make change is in withholding labor. Are we going to continue to build a world with raging inequality and just accept that mass numbers of people are going to die from the climate crisis while other people can fly to the moon? Or are we going to have these conversations and understand how the major issues that we’re taking on today are issues of working people and working people are part of the solution?
That’s how we can change things. This is if we understand that fundamentally, you’ve got to start with engaging the workers. The biggest thing that somebody is going to turn their head on is whether or not they have their job, a good job and ability to provide for their families.
And if we would just recognize that and understand that, that crosses gender, crosses race, crosses cultural background. Then can we get to build a movement that understands that we have so much more in common than anything that could divide us.
