Taking Off: How The Association of Flight Attendants Sets a First-Class Example

Passengers exchanged nervous glances as they boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Dallas to Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past February. Despite repeated requests (and a free mask) from the flight crew, an unruly passenger, as they are known in aviation parlance, flatly refused to mask up. His ire escalated as the plane taxied toward the runway and then quickly doubled back to the gate. What should have been a routine departure ended with the man being escorted off the plane, throwing the proffered mask and a fisted punch at the Southwest staffer on his way out.

Amid Americans’ return to air travel, unruly passenger incidents are becoming more frequent — as of June, there have already been 3,100 in 2021, 75% of which were related to masking, reported the Federal Aviation Administration— putting cabin crew members at greater risk for harassment and even bodily harm.

On the front lines

Flight attendants aren’t always considered front-line workers, a perception the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, helmed by president Sara Nelson , has been challenging since the pandemic’s early days.

The union, which represents 50,000 aviation industry workers across 17 airlines, championed a federal mandate for masking on airplanes early on and was instrumental in protecting the livelihoods of workers in an industry that crashed during the pandemic.

Though airlines started requiring passengers to wear masks in May 2020, the politics of mask-wearing, confusing safety guidance, and especially the lack of a federal mask mandate made it difficult for crew members to enforce masking policies.

“We need to have everyone wearing masks,” Nelson told CNBC in a June 2020 interview. “If we’re communicating from the government and the industry as well, then that gives the people on the front lines a lot more backing to be able to make sure that this is implemented correctly and it’s not being put on our backs to be the enforcers.”

Staying organized

Twenty-five years as a United Airlines flight attendant makes Nelson, a rising star in the contemporary labor movement, uniquely suited for labor organizing. “Her chosen profession, after all, has been a master class in getting disorderly people to do what she wants,” wrote The New York Times in a 2019 profile. 

With Nelson at the helm since 2014, AFA has demanded legislation to permanently prohibit knives on planes, disrupted the 2019 government shutdown by threatening a strike, and, most recently, lobbied for payroll protections during the pandemic under the hashtag campaign #WorkersFirst.

In February 2020, AFA criticized the government’s scattershot approach to combating COVID-19 and called on the federal government to bump up efforts to contain the pandemic. One year later, Nelson took the government to task again, testifying before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure to request federal vaccination clinics for aviation workers in major airports and ask that the FAA come down harder on passengers who refuse to comply with mask mandates.

Due to the efforts of AFA and other groups, on his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring masks in airports and on commercial aircraft. AFA also helped secure $54 billion in payroll support for aviation industry employees through a provision in last year’s CARES Act and Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, signed into law in March 2021.

Freedom to fly

Though federal relief funds kept many airline workers employed and ready to work upon reopening, aviation ultimately lost 90,000 employees in 2020. During the #HotVaxSummer swell of travelers — the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported more than 66 million domestic and international U.S. travelers in June, up 304% from the previous year — many airlines found themselves short staffed.

For flight attendants who are still working, the job is harder than ever. A recent AFA survey of 5,000 flight attendants revealed that in the past year 85% of respondents had dealt with unruly passengers and 17% had experienced a physical confrontation, despite federal law prohibiting intimidation, assault or interference of crew members duties. 

Hopefully, greater government efforts will see a return to more friendly skies. Biden plans to extend the federal mandate to wear masks in airports and on airplanes until 2022, Reuters recently reported. The FAA has initiated 682 investigations into unruly passenger incidents, nearly four times the number investigations in 2020, which could result in over $560,000 in fines to perpetrators. (The man booted off the Southwest Airlines Dallas-Albuquerque flight was fined $21,000.) And AFA continues to share resources on its website about vaccination and COVID safety for flight attendants.

“Aviation is about bringing people together, not tearing us apart,” wrote AFA in a recent press release. “Every person matters, and we can only have the freedom of flight when we recognize the reality that we are all in this together.”

Originally appeared in the fall 2021 issue of The Compass Magazine.