Airline workers held Trump to account in his first term—here's what we can learn from them now

Airline workers held Trump to account in his first term—here's what we can learn from them now

Donald Trump will once again be inaugurated as president in just a week’s time, and the lessons of workers’ victories from his past administration provides an important roadmap to the fight ahead. In 2019, flight attendants organized to end a government shutdown that threw airports around the country into chaos. Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, joins The Real News for a look back at the 2019 shutdown fight and how unions can give workers the tools they need to fight back over the next four years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

On January 20th, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States of America. As I sit with you here now, I can feel the pull of what’s coming. It’s like we’re fast approaching a waterfall. We really don’t know what’s on the other side, but big changes are coming one way or another. We don’t know how the next four or eight or even 50 years will play out because that story has yet to be written. What happens next depends on what we all do now.

But if we want to be the authors and protagonists of that story, not just names and stories written by some sociopathic, billionaire oligarchs or religious fanatics, not just numbers on a corporate spreadsheet or in a passing news report, then we got to be very clear about what we’re fighting for, what side we’re fighting on, and we got to learn from the past about how to fight effectively and win.

And today on The Real News, we are talking with someone who knows a little something about fighting and winning. Sara Nelson is one of the most prominent and widely known labor leaders in the United States and around the world, a United Airlines flight attendant since 1996. Sara has served as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants CWA AFL-CIO, a union representing over 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines since 2014.

But it was exactly six years ago that Sara Nelson became a household name. If you all recall, six years ago in January of 2019, the US was in the midst of the longest government shutdown in our history, a shutdown that lasted 35 days. It was the second government shutdown that took place during Donald Trump’s first term, and the shutdown centered on Trump’s demand that Congress approve $5.7 billion in federal funds to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

The shutdown resulted in around 380,000 federal workers being furloughed with an additional 420,000 federal employees forced to work without pay until the end of the shutdown. While working people suffered and Democrats and Republicans in DC played their game of high stakes political brinkmanship, Sara Nelson stepped into the national spotlight and called on the labor movement to intervene.

Sara Nelson:

We are here today because we are concerned about our safety, our security, and our economic stability, our jobs. For years, the right has vilified federal workers as nameless, faceless bureaucrats. But the truth is they’re air traffic controllers, they’re food inspectors, they’re transportation security officers and law enforcement. They’re the people who live and work in our communities and they are being hurt.

This is about our safety and security and our jobs and our entire country’s economic stability. No one will get out of this unscathed if we do not stop this shutdown. Leader McConnell, you can fix this today. If you don’t show the leadership to bring your caucus to a vote to open the government today, then we are calling on the conscientious members of your caucus to do it for you.

There is no excuse to continue this. This is not a political game. Open the government today. We are calling on the public on February 16th if we are in a day 36 of this shutdown for everyone to come to the airports, everyone come to the airports and demand that this Congress work for us and get politics out of our safety and security.

Maximillian Alvarez:

In a speech she delivered while receiving the MLK Drum Major for Justice Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFL-CIO on January 20th of 2019, Nelson went even further and called for a general strike to end the shutdown and to support the 800,000 federal employees who were locked out or forced to work without pay.

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She said, “Almost a million workers are locked out or being forced to work without pay. Others are going to work when our workspace is increasingly unsafe. What is the labor movement waiting for? Go back with the fierce urgency of now to talk with your locals and international unions about all workers joining together to end this shutdown with a general strike.”

Nelson’s fiery calls to action hit the political world like a lightning bolt. And after a month of political gridlock with the threat of a general strike now on the table, Trump and the GOP caved and ended the shutdown on January 25th.

What can we learn from this pivotal and historic struggle from Trump’s first term in office? What can it teach us about the struggles that we will face with a second Trump term and a fully megafied Republican Party effectively controlling all branches of government and what lies in store for workers in the labor movement itself as we careen into our uncertain future?

To talk about all of this, I’m honored to be joined today by the one and only Sara Nelson herself. Sara, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News, I really appreciate it.

Sara Nelson:

Happy to be with you every time, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right back at you, sis. And we need your voice now more than ever, and I really appreciate you making time for this with everything you’ve got going on, which we’re going to talk about at the end of this interview.

But right now, as those clips that we played in the introduction show, yours was a powerful and essential voice rising from the labor movement at a critical moment during the Trump and GOP-led government shutdown back in 2019. It was, as I said, the longest government shutdown in US history, and this struggle really showed why we need labor movement militancy, and it showed what workers can do to flex our power to change the partisan and political terrain.

So I wanted to ask if you could take us back to that moment during the 2019 shutdown. Let’s remind our viewers and listeners what was actually happening, what was at stake and what was going on in your world, in your heart as all of this was unfolding and why you stood up the way that you did.

Sara Nelson:

Well, Max, every government shutdown is a threat to flight attendants and anyone in the aviation industry, we’re very, very aware of that because you have people like transportation security officers and air traffic controllers coming to work without a paycheck, which is incredibly stressful.

The first thing you learn in safety is remove all distractions. What could be more distracting than not getting a paycheck for going to work? And so as we saw this coming on, we started to define the problem right away. And what we saw in 2018, because this started just before Christmas in 2018, and you would think that people would have a little bit of empathy, but what Donald Trump had done is that, oh, they’re not missing a paycheck yet. This is no big deal. They’re going to get paid and back pay.

And so there was already a division. What we had to do was define the problem, and I want to be really clear about this. This is a really important thing. Define the problem. Set your demands, back up your demands with what you’re willing to do to get them and add urgency. And so the very first thing that we did was we worked very, very closely with the other aviation unions and even the rest of the industry.

Very early in January, I happened to be at an aviation conference with everyone in the room and from manufacturers to airlines, to suppliers to general aviation. I mean, people were worried about this who were flying private jets, right? And aviation unions, we got together and defined all of the issues about why this was a problem to have this shutdown.

There were not safety specter inspectors in place. There were not safety inspectors to sign off on new aircraft for delivery. There was not safety inspectors in place to sign off on pilot licenses where they’re getting their renewed certifications so they could go back on the job.

The issues and the ramifications around this are endless. The other thing that happens is all the work on any modernizing or fixing problems, that all gets put to the side. So as the government shutdown goes on, the safety net stretches to the point where there are holes, and that became more and more dangerous as that shutdown went on.

So we defined that problem. On January 10th, we actually published a letter that had never been published before by the entire industry. Everyone had signed this. These are people who usually fight with each other every single day on Capitol Hill and in the workplace, but we were united around that and nobody remembers that part of the story, but we put that out there. We started having press conferences.

AFGE, they were telling the stories of the workers. These were not just nameless, faceless bureaucrats, like I said in that speech, these were real people that people could see were sleeping in their cars at the airport, not because they didn’t have a home to go home to, but they didn’t even have money to put gas in their car.

And so they were so dedicated to their jobs and the fact that they were forced to come to work because as we knew from Patco, they’d just be fired or possibly sent to jail if they didn’t. And so they were sleeping in their cars because they didn’t have any more gas in their cars to go home and come back and still going back to work in the morning. These are the kind of stories we were able to tell.

And AFGE actually got a hold of a memo that went down through some of the agencies from the administration saying, you are not to say that you were struggling during this shutdown, you are not to share your stories. You’re supposed to tell everyone. You’re just fine. And it’s only because the union was in the workplace that we were able to give workers cover and say, that is baloney. We’re telling the truth. We’re telling the American public what this means to them.

And that is a really important part of this story because that needs to happen in every contract fight that needs to happen in every legislative battle, whether it’s local or federal. We need to be ready to define the issues. And we can do that because nobody knows this work and what it means to our communities and to everyone around us better than working people do. So we got to take that in.

But I kept saying to people, what can we do? What is going to get their attention? And you talked about it. He wanted the money for the southern border wall, and that was what was holding up the package deal. Well, I got to tell you, that was bullshit. Okay? That was racist fear-mongering to try to divide the country further, have people focused on this issue over here when what was really happening was this was Trump trying to get what the GOP had been trying to get for 50 years.

And that is privatize every function of government because if there had been an aircraft accident, if there had been a terrorist attack, there would’ve been incredible weight that had been added to the administrative office of the president and the executive office, and the president would’ve been able to say, I’ll fix it and privatize everything. It’s not working. So we’ll do that. And if nothing happened, of course, it would give more to the narrative of, oh, this is just a bureaucratic mess in government, so we don’t need it so we can shut it down.

So let’s be very clear, Project 2025 was at the heart of that government shutdown. That was already the plan that they were trying to put in place. We see it in black and white now that they’re trying to dismantle these functions of government because what does that do? That makes the most vulnerable, even more vulnerable, which makes people desperate, which makes people agree to things they would never agree to otherwise, just to get fresh air, just to be able to try to feed their families.

And so we cannot have a labor movement that is in a desperate place. We have to be defining the problem and setting our demands. That’s what we did there. And I’ll tell you what, on January 24th, the Senate and the House took a vote that did not pass. The same thing that passed the very next day. And it wasn’t until we had said, we’re ready to strike. We’re calling on everyone else to strike.

And a few flights started to cancel LaGuardia because 10 air traffic controllers signed in for their job and said, “I physically can’t go on. I cannot do my job.” People talk about it calling in sick. No, these are people who have such a stressful job that when they come to work, they leave their phones outside, they go into dark rooms, they have to retire at age 56, and they have to sign a note every single day that says I’m fit for duty.

And they couldn’t continue to sign that they were driving Ubers at night to try to take care of their families. They missed another paycheck just the day before. And so when these flights started to cancel, we said, “Leader McConnell, can you hear us now?” And all of a sudden when there was no political solution about a southern border wall, supposedly there was a solution within a couple of hours because the GOP recognized that workers were going to get a taste of our power, and that was the thing they were more scared of than anything.

So they ended that government shutdown before people could truly take in that when we take action together, we take control of the agenda and we can set forward the policies that matter for working people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, yeah. I really want to underline in red pen again in case anyone is forgetting what happened. It was union workers who ended that shutdown. It was workers who applied the pressure that got the people in DC to actually do what they were supposed to do.

And I want to hover on that for a quick second, Sara, because I think, like you said, every government shutdown is a threat to our safety. People don’t think about all the ramifications, but during a 35-day shutdown, you start to see what the effects are. But in every-

Sara Nelson:

Yeah, seniors are going to get kicked out of their housing because that program was down. HUD was down. But workers everywhere were talking about this. And what I also saw there was I was talking about this in interviews as I was going from one part of DC back to our office and the cab driver, when I handed him money, I’ll never forget this.

I handed him the money and he grabbed my hand through the little window of the cab and he had a tear rolling down his cheek and he said, “Thank you. You’re fighting for me too.” Because no one was coming to work. There were no cab fares to be had. This is all related. We’re all in this together.

And what I noted in that moment, especially as this all started, was that we had been suffering for 40 years of an attack on the strike and attack on unions, an attack on working people while the rich got richer, our wages stayed flat, productivity went through the roof.

And that was because Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981, sent many of them to jail and told the rest of the country, all of corporate America, that it was open season on unions. And the labor movement did not respond the way that we should have been. We should have understood that even though Patco endorsed President Reagan and people were pissed about it, even though they had demands that were demands that were better than the rest of ours, they were fighting for a 32-hour work week.

And people were like, “Oh, they’re greedy.” And all this stuff. There was all this messaging. The fact that we let that happen, the rest of us have been suffering ever since because of the attack on that strike, because the attack on working people. And so this moment in the government shutdown was also about righting that wrong and resetting the course for working people to understand that an injury to one is an injury to all, and it is a ripple effect.

And if you don’t get out there and stand up with the most vulnerable people, they’re coming for you next. And that’s what we saw. We’ve seen it. We need to know that we learned that, and hopefully we’re not going to ever allow that to happen again.

Maximillian Alvarez:

On that note, that’s also what makes 2019 such a pivotal moment, both in terms of the Democrat, republican, bipartisan political side of things, and as you mentioned, the labor movement politics within unions 40 years after Patco, right? Or nearly 40 years after the Patco strike. You were really kind of stepping into a moment where these two things were converging.

And I just wanted to ask a little more about that. Because in every government shutdown, it’s basically a waiting game opinion to see which party gets blamed for the shutdown and caves to the public pressure and gives into the demands of the other side. And that’s kind of what we were watching unfold six years ago.

But then people’s imaginations changed because a new player entered the chat. You and the movement and workers and unions showed that it’s not just Democrats and Republicans who have a say in what happens here. And so I wanted to ask what that moment meant for the breaking of people’s political imagination and why that’s such an important lesson for us to take to heart now.

But also if you could speak a little more on what state the labor movement was in at that point and what willingness the organized labor movement writ large was willing to play and why this was such a step forward calling for a general strike, like urging more militancy like you did six years ago.

Sara Nelson:

Well, I want to be really clear that that was on the backs of the Chicago teachers in 2012 being willing to say under Karen Lewis’s leadership, the word strike again, being willing to organize in a way that brings the entire community to the fight and helps the community understand what that fight was about. And that strike inspired then West Virginia teachers to go out on an illegal strike.