- There are no illegal strikes, there are only unsuccessful ones.

If you generate enough power, you can get resolution and protect everyone.

This is a moment of crisis, where we can set the agenda and take a different turn here.

You will fight and win, you will fight and lose, but you must fight.

- Build your union!

There has to be labor solidarity.

We have to understand that if one group is under attack, we're next.

There will be a catalyst that brings everyone into the streets.

It's coming.

- Coming up on "Laura Flanders and Friends," the place where the people who say it can't be done take a back seat to the people who are doing it.

Welcome.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Sara Nelson] And the members of the Association of Flight Attendants know the realities of the aircraft cabin better than anyone.

We don't just serve drinks, we save lives.

We don't just negotiate contracts, we move major policy issues, like the smoking ban, (speaker beeping) no knives on planes, clean water, and safe food on board.

The air we breathe matters, and we stop the spraying of poisonous pesticides.

Training, rest, and no calls on planes matter as we fight fires, deescalate conflict, revive, and breathe life.

- That announcement from the Association of Flight Attendants in 2016 provides a glimpse of how today's guest frames her message and her mission.

Representing some 55,000 members at 20 airlines, Sara Nelson valiantly defends her people.

Back in 2019, she used the threat of a strike to ground air traffic to help end an extended government shutdown.

During the pandemic, she won a $54 billion COVID relief package for her industry.

Nelson is in her third term as AFA International President and widely regarded as one of the most lion-hearted leaders in the labor movement.

When Bernie Sanders launched his Fight The Oligarchy tour, she joined.

When UAW leader Shawn Fain floated talk of a general strike, she chimed in.

When viewers and listeners to this program ask me what is to be done about the direction in which this country is moving right now, I often think, I bet Sara Nelson has a plan.

And so, I am very glad to welcome Sara Nelson to "Laura Flanders & Friends."

- Laura, thank you so much.

I'm so happy to be talking to you, and especially in this moment.

- Exactly.

Well, I'll tell you, it helps me as we begin these conversations to just kind of settle myself.

And I do that sometimes by just asking my guests who is uppermost on their minds, in their hearts as we begin to speak.

So who are you bringing to this conversation today?

- I always bring the people that I work with.

So whenever I feel like I have lost my way or anything, I think about the people that I have shared a jump seat with, worked across a beverage cart with, had to deal with scary moments in aviation.

And then, I also always, always, always think about my friends that I lost on September 11th, Flight 175 that slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

And everyone can picture that, because all cameras were trained on that site, because American Airlines Flight 11 had hit the North Tower 17 minutes earlier.

So I know the exact moment that Amy and Michael and another Amy and Kathryn, Al, Alicia, Robert, Marianne and Jesus lost their lives.

But I also know now, that in that moment, when we were grieving the loss of our friends and trying to pick up the pieces, and seeing half of our ranks get furlough slips, and then the bankruptcies that followed, I learned that in that moment when we were grieving and trying to come together, there were crisis capitalists who were trying to redefine the value of a pilot, a flight attendant, a mechanic, a gate agent, and to do what they had done in so many other industries that didn't have as high union density as the airline industry, to make people work more for less, shed pensions, and legacy costs, transfer more of the cost of the healthcare to the people on the front lines.

And so, I'm thinking about all of them.

I'm thinking about how to fight back and I'm thinking about the flight attendants who are calling us right now, saying, "I'm terrified, because my family is in the process of being properly documented.

My family is from another country.

My loved ones are, my neighbors are.

What can we do to help them?"

And so, you asked what seemed to be a simple question, (Laura chuckling) but I see those faces.

I see the faces of the people that I love and have lost.

I see the faces of the people who want to honor their memory and try very hard to do their jobs every single day.

And I see the people who are terrified right now, because their loved ones may be taken away from them.

- Well, it is so helpful for you to bring us back to that reality, because we, as passengers, as clients of the airlines, we see your smiling faces.

We see the flight attendants (Sara chuckling) who do all that emotional work of keeping from us what's going on for them and making us as comfortable and secure as they can.

How safe are our skies for customers, clients, passengers, and the people you work with every day?

- Aviation is the safest mode of transportation in the world.

That is the product of aviation being highly unionized, not only in the United States, but also around the world.

When we say things like, "Never forget," and "Never again," we mean it.

We don't just have companies that are beholden to the shareholders and the financiers that, you know, they can say all day long that safety is first.

But it's really the people who are putting their lives on the lines, getting onto those flights, who truly have the real interest in keeping safety first.

So our voices are so important, and I will tell you that there are a lot of stresses and strains on aviation right now, and we can get into all of those.

But we certainly do have disruptions.

And the first thing that you learn in safety is to remove all distractions.

So when you have programs like DOGE coming in and telling people to justify their work, telling them to write essays about how they will be loyal, not to their country and the oath that they've taken, but to Donald Trump himself, telling them that they may not have the people next to them to work with, knowing that this president has said, "Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in four days.

I'll do it in four minutes."

You know, these are incredible distractions.

And then, dismantling all of the programs that help aviation, the National Weather Service, USAID, so that we can fly safely around the world, and so, that we can identify where communicable disease exists, stop it before it gets to our airports, and we become the conduit to spreading what could be the next pandemic.

All of these things are of serious concern to us.

What I would tell the public is that today, look to your flight attendants.

Look to your pilots.

If it's not safe, we're not gonna go.

And it may be very frustrating, there's a lot of delays and cancellations these days.

That is because the people who are on the front lines of aviation are slowing things down in order to keep things safe.

May not be as efficient for everyone, but we're going to keep it safe.

- We have had our attention focused with the deadly floods in central Texas on those cuts to the weather service and NOAA.

What do you fear will come of this moment, more privatization or more reinvestment in the public?

Because what we've learned since the dying is how invested some of Trump's appointees to those very agencies and the commerce secretary himself were in businesses that stood to gain from the privatization of weather prediction.

- Yes, I mean the whole approach here, Project 2025, and what I saw very clearly during the government shutdown in 2018 and rolling into 2019 is that this is about breaking government so that it doesn't work, so that everything can be privatized; so that people will say, "Fix it," and they'll be willing to accept things that they haven't been willing to accept in the past.

I also see this as a moment of opportunity, because we really understand what's going on here.

The working class can also join together, the labor movement.

When I say the labor movement, I do not just mean the people who are holding union cards today, because there's not enough of us.

But 70% of the public would like to join a union if they could, if they could have access without interference from their employers or interference from the laws.

And so, we need to think about the labor movement in that way.

So many things are decided in our politics by a 50 plus, you know, 1% vote in order to just get over that threshold of a majority.

But the reality is that there are so many people in this country that want the same things, need the same things, and we can demand it in this moment.

This is a moment of crisis where we can set the agenda and take a different turn here to set forward policies that actually build our economy from the ground up.

- Well, you're speaking our language about what possibilities exist in this moment.

But I want you to go back to how you woke up to the importance of union membership.

Because if I have my facts right, you didn't get born a labor activist?

- No, no, I was born in, in Corvallis, Oregon.

My mom was actually a member of a union, but we never talked about it.

So now I know that we had a steady paycheck, we had healthcare, we had all these protections because my mom was a union member, but that wasn't a part of my consciousness growing up at all.

And so, it wasn't until I became a flight attendant with United Airlines that I was out flying the first few weeks on the job, and I had finished going to a very expensive liberal arts school that my parents had helped pay for, and that I was also staring down massive student debt (Sara chuckling) to pay off after that.

And so, they were a little upset that I was going to be a flight attendant.

They were much happier six months later when they got the flight benefits to fly all over the world.

(Laura chuckling) - I bet they were.

(Sara laughing) - But at the time, you know, I wasn't asking them for help.

and I didn't get my first paycheck.

So I went into the office to ask someone for help and they said, "Oh, you get your first paycheck at different times for different reasons."

And so, I still didn't have a paycheck, and I asked someone to help me.

And it was the first time that I felt like I was just a number in an HR file.

And they were saying the same things to me, and nobody was hearing me.

And so, the tears started to roll, and I had this tap on the shoulder and turned around.

There was someone standing there who looked a lot like me.

She was wearing the same uniform.

I had never seen her before.

I do remember her AFA pin on (Laura chuckling) shining right above her wings.

But she was just a line member, and she asked me how to spell my name and handed me a check for $800.

And she said, "Number one, you go take care of yourself.

And number two, call our union."

And I did call our union, and I got my paycheck the next day.

But I really learned everything that I needed to know about being in a union in that moment, because in our unions, we're never alone.

So that's really what got me involved in the beginning.

And there were a lot of lessons that I learned along the way, but then five years later was when September 11th hit, and that's when I got the really hard lessons in life and the real lessons about why unions are so necessary to put a check on unchecked capitalism.

- What are some of the things that your union has fought for over your years?

- It's been pretty extraordinary.

I mean, I was hired just after we won the no smoking fight on planes.

So our union took on Big Tobacco and was the first to win and get that out of our workplace, and helped the traveling public too.

One of the things that I had to do in training is have a day that was makeup day, where we would go and learn how to put makeup on, and we were required to buy the makeup if we didn't have our own makeup.

And the guys got the day off, and we were required to wear two inch heels to work.

So in the middle of this bankruptcy as we're fighting for our pensions, the flight attendants were saying, now that we're working these longer days, because we've given so much up from the bankruptcy, and we had to work longer days and work more hours in order to make up for the pay cuts, in the middle of fighting for our pensions, we stopped everything to do a petition.

Because what people really wanted was to be able to wear comfortable shoes.

And I remember feeling so beaten down and demoralized from that bankruptcy.

We had already been in the bankruptcy for two years, so people were feeling defeated, but they won on the shoes.

We won in a month's time (Laura chuckling) to be able to wear the same shoes that nurses wear on the job.

And the flight attendants felt that feeling of that win.

And that led to then fighting for the pensions and taking a strike vote that was 99.9% to be able to fight for that pension.

It was ultimately allowed to be terminated by the court, but we were the only work group to improve upon the pension without having to pay for it with a retirement replacement plan because of our fight.

One of the things that I'm proudest of is our efforts to try to improve our minimum rest on the job.

And it was a massive fight with a lot to learn there.

We had to get bipartisan support.

We had rallies, we had studies that were commissioned.

We had so much work that happened.

And what it all came down to in the end was it was the last item on the table in the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Bill.

And in that bill, we were also talking about sexual harassment, and upping the fines, and defining sexual harassment and assault as an actual unique crime on the job.

So that was also important.

But in the final moments, I got a message from the leadership of the committees that this was going through, both the House and Senate were meeting together.

And they said, "There's not a single Republican who will sign up to support your 10 hours of minimum rest."

And I happened to be in a car with the President of the United Mine Workers of America, Cecil Roberts at the time.

And we had just helped save the miners' pensions and healthcare that had been promised to them.

We had been out helping them on that.

And I was going to another rally along the same lines with him right then.

And I said, "Cecil, I need you to call Shelley Moore Capito right now."

(Laura chuckling) And he was able to call the senator and not just say, "Do this favor for me."

But he was able to say, "This is someone, and this is a union that fought to make sure that your constituents maintained that retirement security.

You need to do this for them now.

It's the right thing to do."

And she did it within five minutes.

And that is the final argument that was made in that 2018 FAA Reauthorization Bill.

And we finally won those additional two hours of rest that we had been fighting for for over 30 years.

- It is contagious, the story that you're telling about wins, and this is why it is so tragic to me that we get so little coverage of the labor movement, as you described, of working people's fights and experiences, and wins.

I wanna say when we fight, we win.

Sometimes that slogan rings hollow after the Kamala Harris campaign, but hey, what I'm hearing from you is when we fight, we win.

And I wanna ask you how you're applying that to this moment.

I remember back in that time of the government shutdown, hearing you say, we just need to shut down three airports.

(Sara laughing) You had done a kind of power mapping of where the vulnerabilities were in our system or where the pressure points could be.

- Yes.

- Have you done that mapping now?

Where are they now?

- So what's interesting is that our union does use a strike tactic called CHAOS, "Create Havoc Around our System."

And part of the power of it is that we don't announce when or where we're going to strike.

- Well, fair enough.

(Laura and Sara laughing) - So we use that same tactic, and it is very powerful.

But what I would say in that, in that shutdown, what we did for 35 days was define the real safety risks of the ongoing government shutdown.

When we saw in this government shutdown that once again, it was air traffic controllers who were on the line, and other government workers.

And we said we cannot do what we did in 1981, which was to turn our back on the air traffic controllers and say, "This isn't our fight."

Because it affected all of us.

This is a moment when we all need to come together.

And that's when I gave the speech and called on the rest of the labor movement to talk about a general strike to end that shutdown.

And defining that worker power in the way was key to ending that shutdown.

Because when there was still no political solution in sight on day 34, and the Senate voted again and voted against it, the very next day, a few flights started to cancel in LaGuardia.

We had already defined that it was workers that were going to take over, and in order to make sure that we wouldn't get a taste of our power as working people, that government shut down ended in a couple hours when there was no solution in sight for 35 days.

So we can take that lesson of what happened there and understand that, first of all, there has to be labor solidarity.

We have to understand that if one group is under attack, we're next.

So we have to rush to each other's sides, but we can also turn this around and not just be on defense, but think about in a crisis.

And we are in a crisis.

- Yeah.

- Our world is burning.

We can actually set the agenda and make things better.

- You have union leaders like Shawn Fain, and a few others talking about a general strike.

You have others talking about 2028 as a moment where contracts could be coordinated.

What are you seeing as critical moments for people to be thinking about?

Because as you started by saying, the union movement has been hampered from growing.

There are less than one in 10 American workers today, in most places, are unionized.

The idea of a strike feels like something from the '30s.

(Sara laughing) And I've heard a lot of skepticism from people, like, "Well, yeah, nice pie in the sky, but will it ever happen?

How would it happen?"

- So a couple things, Laura.

First of all, you're right, from the '30s.

1934, there was some of the highest amount of strike activity this country has ever seen.

And there were national strikes.

The mine workers were on strike for nine months.

There were general strikes in various cities, Toledo, Oakland, there was a textile strike all across the South.

There was massive unrest.

And that's actually what brought the corporations crawling to FDR to ask for labor law, because they wanted some stability.

And it also gave FDR the power to sign into law, The New Deal, because these were very clear demands coming from labor across the board.

These were not legal strikes.

But as I always say, there are no illegal strikes.

There are only unsuccessful ones.

If you generate enough power, you can get resolution and protect everyone.

And you will learn so much by going to a picket line about how to be organized, about how to be very disciplined, about having nonviolent activity as we're doing this, and making sure that we're not putting in the hands of the oppressors, the argument that they can make that things get violent, so they have to come in and have martial law or police state.

We can't hand any of these tactics over to them.

But first and foremost, there is a fight likely going on in your community.

Find it, go out there, learn about the fight, take donuts to the picket line, you know, contribute to the strike funds, find out what you can do to support in other ways.

And there will be a catalyst that brings everyone into the streets.

It's coming.

I would say, for me, my red line has already been passed.

A million workers in the federal government had their contracts canceled.

That was my red line.

But I know that we're not all there yet.

So we have to continue to define these things.

We have to define the commonalities that we have and look for opportunities to build those relationships.

And if people just practice these organizing skills that are easy to take part in today in society, you can find these fights anywhere.

We can actually build up labor solidarity and a real experience for people to be able to take on the big fight.

And finally, I would just say that the strike is very powerful, but the threat of the strike is where the power is.

And so, if people are ready to do this, just like in 2019, when it looked like it, we were on the verge of going into an outright strike across aviation, we got to an agreement instead.

- There's two questions.

One I have for you is about the unions that have stuck with Trump and the unions who have been reluctant to participate or even talk about the kind of solidarity that you are talking about.

And then secondly, where you see exciting breakthroughs, because I think we've seen some of those recently too.

But first, I mean, it's not like there haven't been unions back in the Trump side of all this.

There have.

- For the most part what's going on right now is something that naturally happens, and that is the human condition.

When you're under attack, the instinct is to go hunker down, to get in your bunker, and preserve what you have.

And that is exactly the wrong response right now.

So we have to push everyone to understand that nonviolent does not mean non-conflict.

I would call on every union to be, you know, more clear in what they're willing to do to fight back.

Some have been forced to, their own members have been seized and detained by ICE.

And this has given an opportunity for people who might think, "This isn't my issue," to suddenly realize "this is my issue."

So I do see bright spots like that, and sometimes, you will lose.

But even in the losses, you will learn something, and you will be able to recalibrate and go to the next battle, and usually, use those lessons to win.

Mother Jones, the great labor organizer said, and she said this on the heels of the Ludlow Massacre in the early 1900s, where miners were in tent cities striking, and the Baldwin-Felts and the National Guard opened fire on them, and then set fire to their tent city and burned 28 people alive.

On the heels of that, Mother Jones came there and she said, "Sure, you lost.

Because any contest between the Constitution of the United States and a bayonet, the bayonets gonna win every time.

But you will fight and win.

You will fight and lose, but you must fight."

And the part of the story that we don't often hear in history is that that was a clarion call to the rest of the miners across Colorado, who came with their guns and their ammunition, and held Ludlow safe while people could have their funerals, and mourn the dead, and make, you know, the graves where people could be properly buried.

And they created their own government for a month's time.

No one ever talks about this.

But they learned from that.

And from there, they continued to organize and make their union stronger, and became the largest union in the country, the United Mine Workers of America, that then built up the steel workers, and the auto workers, and gave them the cash to be able to do that, and the support to be able to do that.

And so, you will fight, and like Mother Jones said, "Fight and win, fight and lose, but you must fight."

- Sara Nelson, thank you so much, of the AFA.

It's been a pleasure talking with you.

- Thank you, Laura.

Appreciate it so much.

(cymbal crash) - When activists call for a general strike, cynics scoff, "Isn't that taking us back a hundred years?"

But let's be real.

It's the GOP that's taking us backwards, trying to erase a century of public protections, born of public experience and struggle.

Just look at the flooding in the Texas Hill country, washing entire communities away.

It wasn't just rising water or nature that cost lives, but the disinvestment in public infrastructure and the gradual gutting of the idea of government as our public expression of caring for one another as a mutually dependent society.

The irony is that the very new deal that Republicans are trying to destroy today was inspired in part by legislators in that Texas Hill country a century ago.

As Robert Caro writes, legislators there then passed public relief and protection programs that inspired FDR.

They didn't think of it as charity.

They thought of it as democracy in action for the common good.

And so, it is today.

So when you hear collective action dismissed as nostalgia, consider.

It may not be nostalgia at all.

This is a lesson we have learned already.

Talk to your great grandparents.

But if we have to learn it again, we will.

It's not nostalgia, it's survival, and mutual caring, and democracy, because the floods, they're coming for all of us.

'Til the next time, stay kind, stay curious.

For "Laura Flanders & Friends," I'm Laura, and you can find my full uncut conversation with Sara Nelson through subscribing to our free podcast.

All the information is at our website.

Thanks for joining us.

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