Sara Nelson wants to break the AFL-CIO out of its male-dominated, blue-collar rut and return the labor movement to its activist roots
in Washington this past summer, Sara Nelson was in her element, waiting to speak to a revved-up crowd of union members at Reagan National Airport. Dressed in a navy flight attendants’ uniform, she stood out against the sea of jewel-toned business suits and union T-shirts.
If it intimidated Nelson that she was slotted to speak alongside two of the nation’s most notable progressives — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — it didn’t show. Over the course of her seven-minute speech, Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, excoriated American Airlines executives for outsourcing catering jobs and driving down wages.“We’re here to call bullshit on that scam!” Nelson roared into the microphone. “American Airlines is responsible — isBy the end, the crowd of several hundred was cheering louder for Nelson than it had for Sanders. As she stepped away from the podium, Senator Sherrod Brown , who was up later, leaned over and playfully whispered in her ear: “I fucking hate you.” Coming from Brown, one of the labor movement’s most beloved politicians, the salty jab speaks to Nelson’s emerging public profile. Though she leads a union with nearly 50,000 members from 20 airlines few people outside corporate boardrooms and airplane galleys know Nelson’s name. In the male-dominated universe of the American labor movement, however, Nelson is gaining altitude with a pace that resembles the dramatic emergence of youthful female politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “She has come from — I don’t want to say nowhere — she has come from not being very well known to being a star in the labor movement,” Brown said in an interview later. “She’s just so good. She captures the crowd and you don’t want to speak after somebody like that.” Nelson’s rise can be attributed to a potent mix of progressive politics and relentless self-promotion. More than anyone else in the labor movement, she has tapped into the energy on the new left and used the, ascending past a ruling class of older white men to become one of the most visible labor leaders in America. She has crisscrossed the country lamenting the evils of unchecked capitalism and taken on the president with the gusto of someone running to unseat him. Nelson’s first major burst of publicity came earlier this year during the government shutdown when she called for a general strike, a seldom-used nuclear option in which union leaders incite widespread work stoppages across multiple industries. A general strike hasn’t occurred in earnest, when more than 100,000 workers in Oakland, California, shut down the city for three days. While Nelson’s proposition was legally dubious—federal workers face severe consequences for striking without authorization—less than a week later, air traffic controllers called in sick,hours later, and the longest shutdown in American history ended. “She’s the closest thing to kind of a charismatic labor leader we’ve had since, you know, maybe Caesar Chavez.”It's an accomplishment that Nelson proclaims in almost every speech. The fact that Nelson didn’t actuallyanything tangible to end the shutdown—she was not in the room negotiating with Trump and has no direct influence over the air traffic controllers, who have a union of their own—is almost beside the point. What matters, in the eyes of more than a dozen people in the labor movement who spoke to me for this article, is that she said what an increasingly agitated swath of union supporters wanted to hear. “She’s the closest thing to kind of a charismatic labor leader we’ve had since, you know, maybe Cesar Chavez,” said Peter Dreier, a union historian at Occidental College. Nelson, 46, is now weighing a run to become first woman to lead the AFL-CIO, effectively the leader of organized labor in the United States, representing 12.5 million workers who still have the power to shape major legislation and swing elections. The election to replace the federation’s leader, Richard Trumka, who is expected to step aside, won’t happen until October 2021, well after a presidential contest that is shaping up as referendum on the nation’s tolerance for seismic left-wing change to the economy. Nelson has tied her candidacy to the same progressive ideas that are dominating the debate among the Democratic aspirants for the White House and wants to remake the labor federation as dramatically as candidates like Sanders and Warren hope to do from the White House. She rejects the current labor leadership’s moderate approach and unapologetically calls on labor to embrace a more liberal set of values as a way to reverse decades of systemic decline in membership and influence. The labor movement is split—thanks to Trump, whose candidacy in 2016 created a schism in the labor vote that deeply embarrassed Trumka and probably helped deliver the White House to a president who openly despises unions. Nelson, however, is not interested in pulling the factions back together. She wants to repudiate Trump—and, implicitly, rank-and-file members of AFL-CIO unions who support him for his trade policies and broader war on establishment elites. Left: George Meany shares a laugh with President Lyndon Johnson at a dinner in 1967. Right: Richard Trumka introduces President Barack Obama ahead of a 2010 speech on the economy. | AP Nelson does not fit the classic profile of an American labor leader, at least not the cigar-chomping, pugnacious image enshrined in the public consciousness by the likes ofand Jimmy Hoffa. Nelson, with her signature platinum blond hair, favors silk scarves, though she swears like a sailor. She grew up as a Christian Scientist, abstaining from medical treatment until her late 20s, but now advocates universal health care. Nelson is known for popping up on TV at all hours talking about workers issues, even those that don’t directly relate to flight attendants and has hired an outside media consultant to boost her public profile. It’s all a sharp contrast with Trumka, who lives for deer hunting every fall at his Pennsylvania property and began his labor activism representing mine workers. Nelson began at 30,000 feet and would rather spend time with her young son, Jack. Her likely candidacy also embodies the growing influence of women in the labor movement and the shift of unions away from the blue-collar manufacturing sector to more white-collar jobs in service industry and government. While union membership rates among men have fallen by more than half since the early 1980s, the percentage of women has dropped by just 4 percentage points over the same period; as of last year, the rates were nearly equal. And in public-sector unions—a sector that gained 132,000 members from 2018 to 2019 despite a“Sara Nelson embodies the changing demography of the labor movement, which is now increasingly women and increasingly people of color,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Work, Labor, and Democracy center at the University of California Santa Barbara. She matches the demographic shifts but she is by no means a lock to replace Trumka. She has acquired detractors throughout her career, many of whom were reluctant to criticize her on the record for fear of reprisal. They see her as less of a coalition builder than a flashy, self-involved promoter. Perhaps most significantly, she would have to outmaneuver Liz Shuler, the AFL-CIO’s well-liked secretary treasurer, who has also expressed interest in running and would be a natural successor to Trumka. But Nelson’s candidacy alone could pull unions to the left on a host of issues, according to labor scholars and activists who have followed her career trajectory. “If you want to lead the labor movement, you have to think bigger,” Nelson told me in an interview earlier this summer at an upscale restaurant in downtown Washington. Relentlessly on message, she hardly touched her salmon and kale salad as she deftly avoided sounding eager to replace an incumbent who hasn’t retired yet. “Whether or not I hold a position that is a title position,” Nelson added, “I want to do everything I can to make this labor movement strong and work for working people and totally change the rules of the game in this country.” Which raises the central question: Can labor return to its radically progressive roots, or will Nelson’s left-wing candidacy further divide a movement that was long a mainstay of Democratic support?After graduating from a tiny Christian Science college in St. Louis in 1995, she was working four jobs, barely making ends meet. A friend called from Miami Beach in 1996 and told her about her salary and benefits as a flight attendant. The next day, Nelson drove 300 miles to Chicago and interviewed with United Airlines. The glamour faded when her first paycheck didn’t arrive on time. Desperate and out of money, Nelson rode a jump seat from Boston to Chicago just to eat free plane food. When she landed back east she went to the airline desk, and was told her check still hadn’t arrived. As she began to cry, a stranger tapped her on the shoulder. It was a fellow flight attendant who wrote her a check for $800 on the spot. “She [said], number one, you’ve got to take care of yourself, and number two, call our union,” Nelson said. “I learned everything I needed to about our union and the labor movement in general.” From her earliest days, Nelson saw the dark side of a profession that depended on women and devalued them in equal measure. Up until 1970, United flight attendants could not be married under company rules, and it was common for airlines to show flight attendants the door at 32. By the mid-1990s, when Nelson began flying, attendants had just finished waging war over policies that set body weight limits; in 1993, USAirthat a 5-foot-5-inch female attendant weigh no more than 138 pounds. Two of Nelson’s co-workers suffered from eating disorders promoted by years of shame from their employer. They died soon after. “That was the product of those weigh-ins,” Nelson said, tears welling in her eyes. “Maybe they were prone to it or whatever, but the weigh-ins killed them. And I saw it firsthand.” “Most flight attendants thought we just had to deal with [sexual harassment]. And we dealt with it by going internal, by building our union … to gain respect for our roles.”“It wouldn’t have even crossed your mind to complain about any sexual advances by anyone—by passengers, by pilots, by anyone in the office,” Nelson said. “Most flight attendants thought we just had to deal with it. And we dealt with it by going internal, by building our union, and taking other actions … to gain respect for our roles.” A week after the incident with her first paycheck, Nelson was recruited to do the union’s new-hire program and was soon named local communications chair. Six months later, the national union presented members with a contract proposal with United “that I thought stunk,” Nelson said. She led a charge to get it voted down; it passed by 51 percent nationally but, she said, “I did a really good job in Boston because we voted it down by 80 percent.” “Instead of giving up, I got more involved and was a dissident voice in the union,” Nelson said. “Not really to tear the union down but to challenge the union.” Nelson was off on Sept. 11, 2001, and had planned to spend the day doing union work. At 9:03 a.m., one of her usual flights to Los Angeles, United 175, collided with the south tower of the World Trade Center. She knew the entire crew, as well as two customer service representatives who were going on vacation. The experience crystallized Nelson’s view of flight attendants as essential guardians of public safety. In an effort to keep spreading the message, she became the union’s national communications director for the United chapter in 2002, which served as a platform to become vice president in 2011 and then president in 2014. Nelson is reluctant to talk about the way she became president of AFA, probably because it involved ousting the cancer-stricken incumbent. The incident, which has not been previously reported, is a messy part of Nelson’s carefully curated image. In the wake of a merger between U.S. Airways and American Airlines, Nelson participated in a coup against Veda Shook, who had been president for three years. U.S. Airways, whose employees were represented by Nelson and Shook’s union, was; American had its own union, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which was anticipated to represent the new combined unit. Nelson objected fiercely, arguing that the new bargaining unit should be represented by AFA. It was an outlandish proposition, according to several people involved in the talks, given that the American union outnumbered the U.S. Airways flight attendants 2 to 1 and easily would have won a representation election. In September 2013, the board passed a resolution that stripped Shook of her power to negotiate with the American Airlines union, effectively handing the reins to Nelson. The vote was unanimous, a board member at the time told me. Shook, who is no longer involved in the union, was not eager to talk about her relationship with Nelson. “I was still working and undergoing chemotherapy and then all this other stuff happened,” Shook told me. “I didn’t see it coming until it was too late because I’d never met anyone like that before.” According to Shook, Nelson convinced the board that Shook hadn’t fought hard enough for the U.S. Airways flight attendants. In the regularly scheduled election a few months later, Shook was defeated. When I asked Nelson about this, she said other people put her up to it because Shook passed up an opportunity to get a better deal for the union. The AFA contract was better than the American Airlines union’s contract, Nelson said, and could have been used as a bargaining chip to get a better deal for all of the flight attendants. “The leverage that we had was squandered,” Nelson said. “There were a lot of things where we weren’t fighting like we should, so people asked me to step up and fight, and it was probably one of the most difficult times in my life, actually. Painful. Really painful.” “I took massive personal attacks,” she said. “So, hey, I know what that’s like, and I lived through it.” The former board member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, corroborated Nelson’s account, saying the board had “lost confidence” in Shook’s leadership.“It would be very disingenuous for them to say that their contract was better,” said Lenny Aurigemma, one of the negotiators for the American Airlines union. “We felt we got the best of both contracts. … They never made the money that we’re making now. Never, not even close.” “I like Sara. I also like Veda,” said a person who worked for another transportation union that was involved in the merger “And I think a lot of people felt that Veda got a bad deal.” “I don’t think it’s possible to talk about Sara’s history without saying she became president by pushing out the predecessor, because she’s not shy about taking on people who are in these offices,” this person added. “That’s the moral of the story here.” Nelson’s talent for spotlighting the power of her union on hot-button progressive topics that have as much to do with embarrassing Trump as they do with labor issues was on sharp display in March. A Mesa Airlines flight attendant, who was a beneficiary of the DACA immigration program, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on an inbound flight from Mexico and detained for six weeks. Nelson mobilized her publicity machine upon learning of her plight. Hillary Clintonher, setting off a social media storm. Nelson and Mesa Airlines CEO Jonathan Ornstein, who knew each other from prior contract negotiations, spoke on the phone.The flight attendant was released within a day. Ornstein and Nelson should be enemies. But behind closed doors, Nelson proved to be a skilled deal-maker, Ornstein said, and he gained respect for her at the outset when the two were able to finalize contract negotiations in a single meeting in 2017. “You look at the labor movement right now and you’ve got what, 6 percent of the [private-sector] workforce now organized?” Ornstein said. “To me, that kind of creativity is what’s needed. The model needs to change, and I think Sara is the kind of person that could do that.”is due in large part to the political wound Trump dealt to union leadership, specifically Trumka. Three years ago, Trumka suffered embarrassment when portions of his membership—white workers galvanized by Trump’s protectionist trade message and promises of reviving manufacuturing—ignored the federation’s endorsement of Clinton and voted for Trump, rewarding the man accused of
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