Three weeks ago, Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-C.W.A., received a call from a veteran flight attendant who has been working for twenty-five years and who has continued to work during the coronavirus pandemic. “He loves flying, he loves his career,” Nelson told me recently. During a flight to Los Angeles, the flight attendant told her, he’d had a panic attack triggered by the possibility that he might contract the virus and become severely ill. During the layover, he went to his hotel room and sheltered in place. He was too scared to leave his room and couldn’t go out to get food. Room service seemed potentially dangerous, and there was no access to a microwave in the hotel, which meant that he had no place to heat the soup he had in his bag. He ended up terrified, isolated and alone, eating the soup cold, straight out of the can.
“He’s been through all this before,” Nelson continued. She noted that the flight attendant had, like many others, lost his pension and taken a pay reduction after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, sent the airline industry into crisis. “And here we are again,” Nelson said, noting that workers are now facing similar hardships. “This has been real whiplash for people. It’s hard. There are a lot of people who went into work and they felt like they were doing a real service to the country, and they were. And there were other people who were high-risk, and couldn’t go to work, but also didn’t know how they were going to pay their bills.” She started to choke up.
Early in the pandemic, when almost all air travel had suddenly stopped, President Donald Trump and the Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, spoke about the airline industry during a press conference. “This is worse than 9/11. They are almost ground to a halt,” Mnuchin said. He added that, despite the fact that there was almost no passenger demand, it was important that airlines still provide service to every part of the country. “Although we don’t want people to travel unless it’s critical, we want to maintain, for critical travel, the right to have domestic travel.” He had just met with the C.E.O.s of the largest airlines, and, although he would not talk specifically about the potential for a government bailout of the industry, he said that airlines were strategically important and employed a lot of workers, adding, “We’ll be working with Congress on this.” President Trump leaned in to the microphone and said, “The airline industry will be in good shape.”
In March, Congress passed the CARES Act, a two-trillion-dollar coronavirus bailout package, which set aside fifty billion dollars for the airline industry: twenty-five billion of it was for government-backed loans, to be drawn down when needed, and the rest went toward a payroll-support program that would be distributed as grants intended to preserve passenger-airline jobs. Each participating airline received seventy-six per cent of its payroll costs from the middle of 2019. (Portions of the grants are supposed to be paid back over a ten-year period, and the government will receive warrants, a form of equity ownership in the airlines, for ten per cent of the grant value.) “The business fell off a cliff,” Nelson told me. “Literally fell off a cliff. And if there had not been a shoring up right then, the vast majority of airlines would have filed for bankruptcy. And the public would have lost any sort of control of how the airline industry would look at the other end of this.”
In exchange for the aid, the airlines agreed to stringent conditions. They are prohibited from engaging in stock buybacks or issuing dividends through September, 2021. Executive compensation during the period when the company is accepting aid is limited to compensation levels from 2019. Companies were also prohibited from laying off workers for six months, a provision that will end on September 30th. Like other parts of the bailout that were intended to salvage jobs, such as the Paycheck Protection Program, the airline assistance largely worked in the short term. “We submitted our own relief plan that was focussed on workers, and that’s what we achieved: a workers-first package, the first ever in this country, formatted to go directly to the workers,” Nelson said. Most airline workers lost around twenty-five per cent of take-home pay, but the program “kept people on the job, connected to our health care, all of that.” Now, after accepting millions in bailout money, several airlines, including United and American Airlines, have announced that, after the deadline expires in the fall, they will cut thousands of jobs. As Congress debates another rescue package, Nelson and other union leaders representing airline workers are fighting to extend the program by another six months, through March of 2021. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are hanging in the balance.
Nelson has blond hair and large, blue eyes, and is often photographed in a crisp flight-attendants’ uniform. She grew up in Oregon, the daughter of a lumber worker and a music teacher. After graduating from college, with forty-five thousand dollars in student debt, she applied, in 1996, to work as a flight attendant at United. (The six-week training program included instructions on the proper application of makeup.) She quickly distinguished herself as a vocal supporter of workers’ rights, and, in 2010, she was elected vice-president of the A.F.A., a union representing fifty thousand flight attendants at twenty different airlines. In 2014, she became the union’s president, which has placed her at the center of the worst crisis the airline industry has faced in decades.
As the pandemic took hold, in the winter and early spring, air travel dropped by around ninety-seven per cent; it crept up slightly in May, as things seemed to improve and stay-at-home orders across the country were loosened. But business only reached a peak of around twenty-five per cent of pre-pandemic levels, at the end of June, and then began to flatten again, as it became clear that the pandemic was far from over, at least in the United States. The Trump Administration has not taken strong action to curb the spread of the virus, leading to ongoing outbreaks across the country. This has amounted to a form of economic self-sabotage: the Trump Administration’s lack of leadership has undermined the benefits of the costly economic bailouts that Congress passed, insuring that even more money will have to be spent in the future. If the Administration had managed to get the spread of the virus under control by midsummer, the ongoing need for aggressive government bailouts would have been less severe than it currently is.
Nelson and other union leaders have been circulating a letter to members of Congress, urging them to pass the proposed extension of the airline- worker payroll protections. “Air travel remains a slight fraction of last year’s levels and demand will remain depressed well into next year,” the letter reads. “Aviation workers account for 5% of the nation’s GDP. Should October 1 arrive without extending the PSP grant job program mass layoffs are inevitable, as airline executives have acknowledged. Hundreds of thousands of workers will lose their jobs and health insurance— not only in aviation, but across our entire economy.” A majority of members of the House appear to support the idea. But, on July 27th, Senate Republicans released a draft bill that did not contain any provisions related to extending the payments for airline workers.
As the process drags on, Nelson fields calls almost daily from colleagues facing unprecedented working conditions and unsettling questions about the future. When we spoke, she was in touch with a crew stranded in Sydney, Australia, after being ordered to quarantine after a flight; they were stuck in hotel rooms without direct sunlight, unexpectedly separated from their families. “It’s always difficult, because when we go to work we don’t come home for several days, so you have to plan for how everyone at home is going to eat and be taken care of when you’re gone,” Nelson said. “Now there’s the added difficulty that you don’t know what might happen. In some cases, we have had crews show up and all of a sudden, when they land, the policy has changed.” Nelson added, “This is compounded by the fact that the world does not trust the United States right now.”
Nelson was recently talking to a junior flight attendant who had been grounded during the pandemic and hadn’t seen the inside of a plane in a month. A friend of the flight attendant had seen headlines about planned layoffs, and asked her if she thought that she would lose her job, saying, “What if you’ve already flown your last fight?” The woman was overwhelmed. “She said, ‘Wow, that really hit me. I might not even be able to come back to this job. I’m so junior I could get laid off,’ ” Nelson told me, “That’s pretty rough. People are still going to work with that heaviness.” She added, “We’re fighting very hard.”
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