6

The Expense of Justice: Family Values and the Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions Business in the Twenty-First Century

With the domestic partner benefits victory at United Airlines, flight attendant activists had helped prove that unions could still be agents of social change at the end of the twentieth century. Theatrical protests and nonviolent civil disobedience interrupted managerial efforts to roll back previous decades’ gains and won new resources for flight attendants that were impressive even by 1970s standards. Despite a sharp drop-off in real wages, the flight attendant profession continued to offer better pay and benefits than retail work, the hospitality industry, and most other sectors of the booming service economy. A headline-making strike victory at American Airlines over the 1993 Thanksgiving weekend and subsequent near-walkouts at Alaska, Midwest Express, and other carriers reveal unions’ enduring contribution to wage and benefit premiums. Perhaps even more importantly, flight attendant jobs were available to a far wider swath of the workforce in the late 1990s than they were in the 1970s. As the major U.S. carriers spanned the globe in a booming technology economy, they sought candidates with a broad array of linguistic and cultural skills. In the process, people of Asian, African, and Latin American descent found new access to a unionized trade that had once been restricted to young, white, U.S.-born women.

Successful though activists often were, the overall posture of the flight attendant union movement was defensive as the millennium approached. As airfares continued to fall in a deregulated marketplace, and as the aggressive anti-union tactics that emerged during financialization became standard across the industry, flight attendant unions struggled to protect their members’ share of a shrinking pool of economic resources. Activists at individual airlines worked to block management demands for cutbacks, fraying the solidarity that had bound flight attendants across carriers in the 1970s. Unions found it increasingly difficult to maintain long-standing feminist commitments to social justice in an age when economic scarcity pitted flight attendant groups against one another.

Nowhere were these emerging tensions more apparent or more destructive than at American Airlines in 2001. Shortly before Christmas 2000, American bought its once-formidable competitor Trans World Airlines off a bankruptcy court auction block. Soon after the purchase, the Executive Board of the American group’s flight attendant union, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), sent shockwaves through the industry when it voted to deny occupational seniority protection to TWA flight attendants who would join American as a result of the acquisition. Without credit for their years of service, and because airline employees are laid off in reverse order of seniority, former TWA flight attendants would be the first grounded if American downsized. After the APFA vote, a TWA flight attendant who had been flying since the 1960s would be laid off before a new hire at American, a policy that could force older women onto a job market where they would face significant age and sex discrimination. By making it far easier for American Airlines to eliminate older women’s jobs, the seniority vote seemed not only to contradict the flight attendant union movement’s long-standing commitment to lifetime employment and a family wage for workingwomen, but also to transgress decades of collaboration between American and TWA flight attendants. Like their peers at American, TWA flight attendants had organized at the nexus of the labor movement and of women’s, gay, and lesbian liberation in the 1970s, and had certified their union, the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants (IFFA), just a month before APFA in 1977.

With TWA flight attendants’ careers in jeopardy, flight attendants across the industry struggled to understand why the leaders of APFA voted for a policy that would allow American Airlines to ground the former members of IFFA. This chapter addresses this question as it unpacks the challenges facing the flight attendant union movement in the early twenty-first century. Particularly useful for answering flight attendants’ troubling question is the work of Chantal Mouffe, a political theorist who has helped explain how businesses and governments built a consensus around neoliberal reforms after 1970. Describing what she calls the constitutive role of “the political,”¹ Mouffe argues that “political practice cannot be envisaged as simply representing the interests of preconstituted identities, but as constituting those identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain.”² For Mouffe, political mobilization does not simply translate the preexisting interests of political actors. Instead, it produces new subject positions with new interests. In the 1970s flight attendants’ case, activism at the confluence of a still-powerful labor movement, of women’s, gay, and lesbian liberationism, and of a highly mobile profession helped constitute a new political subject, one committed to labor feminism. Demanding more money and less time at work, this new subject challenged the ideology of domesticity and the devaluation of women’s labor that was a consequence of domesticity. For the activist flight attendants of the 1970s, defending their basic economic self-interest would uphold a broader, principled commitment to social justice because a raise for a flight attendant was often a raise for single women, for unmarried parents, for same-sex couples, and for other people in the margins of traditional family.

By the late 1990s, the context of flight attendant political mobilization had shifted drastically. Whereas the flight attendants of the 1970s were part of a broad-based social movement that aimed to enlarge the definition of family and to challenge the devaluation of “women’s work,” by the 1990s a new consensus had emerged among policymakers around pro-family, pro-work politics. As a consequence of that consensus, union density plummeted and much of the feminist and LGBT activist movement retreated into mainstream political organizations that have often facilitated rather than contested the process of neoliberalization. Lacking the support of a wider social justice movement, unions such as APFA shifted their focus away from the daunting task of winning new resources for their members and toward a more manageable bid to protect their members’ slice of an ever-shrinking economic pie. In this strategic decision a new political subject emerged. These new activists remained committed to the movement’s long-standing goal of protecting the economic self-interest of flight attendants. But they would do so at the expense of justice, forfeiting the broader project of transforming social relations that had come out of the women’s liberation movement. For TWA flight attendants, the shift to defensive activism came with a devastating cost. During the economic crisis that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, the new American Airlines eliminated nearly 20 percent of its flight attendant workforce. Since they were first on the layoff list, all forty-three hundred former TWA flight attendants were grounded, and many would never get their jobs back.

In an era when the pro-family, pro-work cultural consensus seemed natural, inevitable, and uncontestable, one might assume that flight attendants’ pressing need to defend their economic self-interest would have rendered the 1970s generation’s social justice agenda an anachronism. In the airline industry, however, family values would have a harder time assuaging the tensions that came in the wake of neoliberal reforms. Flight attendant unions had, after all, spent thirty years identifying and contesting pro-family, pro-work ideology. As a consequence of that history, labor feminism remained central to the debate, vying for position against a narrower, defensive agenda in a painful political conflict that would reveal the stakes of trade unionism in the twenty-first century. The struggle between flight attendants for TWA and American Airlines demonstrates that cultural ideas about gender, family, and work would play a pivotal role in the debate over neoliberal reforms and that there would be no way to challenge downward economic redistribution without making those values the central focus of union activism.

Family Affair: Selling the American-TWA Merger with Family

Although TWA and American Airlines flight attendants had built similar unions at similar airlines in the mid-1970s, their employers followed diverging paths through deregulation and financialization. By 1995, TWA was the weakest surviving major airline. TWA’s daunting financial problems were in part a result of Carl Icahn’s 1986 leveraged buyout of the company (see Chapter 4). Unable to make the interest payments on the junk bonds that Icahn used to buy the company, TWA filed for bankruptcy in 1992 and then again in 1995, cutting unionized workers’ wages in both cases.³ The most painful blow to the company’s long-term financial viability came in January 1995, when it defaulted on a $200 million loan that Icahn had made to facilitate TWA’s emergence from its first bankruptcy. As a penalty for the default, Icahn forced TWA to allow him to become a ticket broker for the airline, a deal that would let him buy TWA tickets at a 45 percent discount and resell them for personal gain.⁴ As a consequence of the Icahn brokerage, TWA’s once-profitable transcontinental and transatlantic routes incurred heavy losses. Therefore, despite record industry earnings during the global technology boom, TWA lost $348 million in 1999.⁵

American, meanwhile, soared through deregulation. Leveraging a strong balance sheet in the early 1980s, American edged Braniff out of its Dallas hub and TWA out of Chicago, gaining a robust east-west route network with relatively little competition. The resulting profits provided the capital necessary for American to buy assets from competitors that were struggling with the transition to a deregulated marketplace. In 1991, for example, American acquired Eastern Airlines’ Latin American routes after that carrier collapsed and then bought TWA’s lucrative London Heathrow hub as the company scrambled for a means to repay its mounting debts. American hoped to build on its earlier successes in the acquisitions business when it engineered another large transaction involving TWA during the year 2000. In this case, American would purchase the remaining assets of the troubled airline in an effort to secure a second midwestern hub. Lucrative though American’s Chicago O’Hare operation had been, it was choked with traffic during the economic boom of the late 1990s and ran constant air traffic control delays as a result of overcrowding. After the TWA buyout, American hoped to refocus O’Hare on the local Chicago business market and divert east-west connecting traffic through TWA’s hub at Lambert field in Saint Louis.

The network synergies that resulted from the buyout would both augment the new company’s finances and produce bitter tensions between American and TWA’s flight attendant groups. Since American had flourished after deregulation, it hired crew members throughout the era and thus had a relatively young and junior workforce. Although these flight attendants faced the downward pressure on wages and work rules that affected workers across the industry, the American group was used to good news at work in the 1990s: a route network that grew across Latin America, Europe, and Asia and offered ample opportunities for lucrative long-haul flying. TWA, meanwhile, had withered. Many TWA flight attendants left the airline amid the unrest of the Icahn buyout, the 1986 strike, and the bankruptcies of the 1990s. Those who remained were mostly 1960s and 1970s veterans whose age provided a significant impediment to starting over in a new profession or at the bottom of another airline’s seniority list.

Well aware of the strife that could result from combining two employee groups with wide disparities in seniority, compensation, and workplace culture, American Airlines managers looked for a tool to relieve the tension. They found that resource in a familiar category in the twenty-first-century political economy: family. Drawing on the logic of the family values economy—that domestic relationships can make up for economic insecurity—American retold the history of TWA as a family affair. “Family Ties, Shared Success,” announced the bold masthead of a special TWA merger edition of American’s employee newspaper the Flagship News. A glossy photograph captured a father and daughter embracing in front of the tail of a TWA DC-9. Both were wearing navy blue uniforms, though the elder’s sported the interlocking gold globes of TWA while the young woman’s bore American’s iconic eagle. The text offered the pair’s family history as an interpretive device for the merger, telling a story of frugality, hard work, delayed gratification, interdependence, and perseverance.

“When I was newly married to Scott, my husband of 15 years, I needed a good, full-time job. My dad prompted me to check out American Airlines.” Now McAllister, her father, who went through a buyout in 1986 as an employee of Ozark Airlines that was bought by TWA, will be joining his daughter at American. . . . “You have to be doing things right to be where American is right now.”⁶

Rather than duck the history of TWA’s difficulties, the article used a family’s story to manage their meaning. “We worked hard to make things go here at TWA and we’re sorry they didn’t work out, but now we just need to work together for American,” reflected another TWA employee quoted later in the text.

As it inserted TWA’s journey through deregulation into the framework of family, the article was able to reference the bitter pain of the airline’s past while abstracting that pain from its political and economic context. The collapse of TWA, after all, was anything but a tale of the thrift, mutuality, and personal responsibility that the image of family invokes. Instead, greed, betrayal, and irresponsibility shaped TWA’s turbulent path through the 1980s. For example, rather than prove their fidelity to the members of the TWA family, the airline’s pilots and machinists crossed flight attendants’ picket lines in 1986 and collaborated with Icahn to save their own careers. Meanwhile, as a result of the Icahn debt, the airline jettisoned valuable assets that employees had fostered for generations and used the proceeds to make interest payments to wealthy private investors who had no connection to TWA.⁷ In the process, the Icahn deal became an emblem for a 1980s Wall Street culture that remade the U.S. economy around short-term economic gain and immediate gratification, the presumed antitheses of family values. But by packaging the merger with the emotional and cultural commitments that bind husband to wife and father to daughter, the Flagship News was able to hide these historical contradictions.

Even more important than the story’s ability to contain the antagonisms of the past was its effort to manage the meaning of the present. The father and the husband, two of the social roles at the center of the Flagship News story, are imagined to provide safety and security for daughters and wives. Vulnerability, however, would define both TWA and American flight attendants’ role in the new relationship they formed during the 2001 buyout. Since the tie-up would happen during the airline’s third bankruptcy, TWA’s employees were particularly vulnerable because the federal court system would wield the authority to impose another round of cuts to pay, benefits, and work rules. Although they had less to fear than the TWA group, American employees were also working in an anxiety-ridden industry where real wages continued to fall and where unionized firms faced intensifying low-cost competition both at home and abroad. Thus, instead of being a loving new familial connection like a marriage or a birth, the merger would force American and TWA flight attendants into a relationship that both groups had legitimate reasons to fear. Despite the efforts of management and of the Flagship News, it was those qualms that would determine American and TWA flight attendants’ connection as they came together in 2001.

Coming Down with the Subcontracting Flu

American Airlines managers couched the TWA merger in a compelling narrative about family as part of an effort to thwart the political unrest that had come to define airline mergers. Corporate tie-ups had always raised the ire of airline workers, since changes to merged carriers’ route systems often forced pilots, flight attendants, and ground crews to move away from domicile cities where they had lived for decades. After two decades of neoliberal reforms, employees had even greater reason for apprehension about the change that mergers would bring. In the case of the late 1990s, corporate restructuring was particularly ominous to workers because of the prevalence of a new managerial technology in the airline industry: subcontracting.

The roots of subcontracting lie in the revolution in aircraft technology that occurred the 1960s. In a rush to modernize and standardize fleets around jets, large airlines retired the planes that had been most efficient for serving the smaller cities on their networks: fifty-seat propeller planes such as the Convair 340 and Martin 404. Since they were unable to profitably serve such towns with expensive new jet aircraft, big carriers depended on local service airlines to fly puddle jumpers between outlying communities and major cities. A passenger originating in Appleton, Wisconsin, and bound for Seattle, for example, could board a North Central Airlines propeller-driven Convair, ride it to Minneapolis, and then transfer to a Northwest Airlines Boeing 707 for the rest of the trip. In the 1970s and 1980s, large airlines began to formalize their relationships with smaller companies, each carrier signing agreements with multiple regional airlines to carry their brands and feed their hubs. United Airlines, for example, hired Aspen Airways and Air Wisconsin to help it serve smaller cities. Both airlines remained separate companies but operated under the name United Express. Pre-1990 regional airline flying certainly siphoned some flight attendant jobs away from established lines. But since most aircraft were small propeller planes staffed by a single flight attendant, and since jumbo jets connecting the largest cities dispatched with a crew as large as eighteen, the majority of job creation remained at the major airlines.

Things changed in 1995. Canadian and Brazilian aircraft manufacturers jumped into the lucrative, dot-com boom in the U.S. domestic market by introducing a new generation of airplanes bringing the comfort and speed of jet propulsion to regional carriers. Hailed to deliver jet-set sophistication to small-town air travelers who had been forced to put up with tiny, bouncy, buzzing propeller planes, the major airlines ordered hundreds of the new jets for their regional partners. But instead of using these “regional jets” to modernize existing small-town routes, the major airlines deployed the new planes to lower their labor costs.⁸ Rather than replace medium-sized jets coming up for retirement at the major airlines, managers stopped ordering such aircraft and transferred the flying to regional jet operators, who paid their crews far less than the majors.

The meteoric rise of the subcontracting system put employees on the defensive because it compounded the downward pressure on compensation that had defined airline labor relations since the early 1980s. The growth of subcontracting is indeed hard to overstate. By the summer of 2013, regional affiliates operated the statistical majority of large airlines’ flights at almost every hub in the United States. For example, 69.9 percent of United’s departures at its giant Chicago O’Hare hub were subcontracted. That means that 69.9 percent of “United” flights at Chicago were actually flown by airlines called Republic or Shuttle America or GoJet or SkyWest—names that most passengers would never recognize. Things were no different at American, where subcontractors ran 66.5 percent of departures at Chicago in 2013, or at Delta, where 67.8 percent of trips were subcontracted at Detroit.⁹ The growing gap between the image and substance of airlines—in which airlines became “brands” offering sales, marketing, paint schemes, and interior design while shirking commitments to the people who sold tickets, who cleaned, catered, fueled, and flew airplanes, and who provided in-flight safety—disturbed workplace activists. Recognizing these vast operational changes, the flight attendant union movement began to ask a troubling question. If management could transfer the majority of operations to subcontractors, what would stop them from transferring all of the flying?

Responding to widespread fears that subcontracting would allow management to turn major airlines into brand identities with no employees, American Airlines workers made headlines as they confronted their employer about the practice. In the summer of 1998, an American pilot doing research on the company’s SEC filings discovered that American had become the majority stockholder of Reno Air, a West Coast upstart with a growing presence in northern California and Nevada.¹⁰ While the impetus for investing in Reno Air seemed innocent to some, since the partnership would provide American new access to the geographic epicenter of the dot-com boom, American’s quiet stockpiling of Reno Air shares spawned workplace rumors that the airline planned to acquire Reno and operate it as a subcontractor. Though some Reno Air staff were unionized—flight attendants had voted in the Teamsters, and cockpit crews had joined the Air Line Pilots Association—the carrier was a low-cost progeny of deregulation and paid far less than American. Buying Reno Air and running it as a separate entity could allow American to fly big MD-80 jets on core routes with cheap, subcontracted crews.¹¹

Aiming to interrupt this potentially damaging expansion of the subcontracting system, American’s pilots took drastic action. In a striking tactical departure from the buttoned-down business unionism that had long dominated pilot politics, thousands of crew members stayed in bed in a grassroots-organized “sickout” on the weekend of February 10, 1999. Vanished pilots forced American to cancel nine hundred flights and spend nearly $50 million reaccommodating stranded passengers.¹² The immediate consequences of the aviators’ mystery illness followed familiar post-deregulation plot lines. Management lawyers rushed from American’s Dallas headquarters to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Wichita Falls to seek an injunction forcing pilots back to work. With an unflagging bravado, Judge Joe Kendall’s decision bore down on “radical elements” among the pilots who caused a “ridiculous” and “outrageous” job action:

When you realize this dispute is about the pilots wanting more money retroactively for flying the same airplanes to the same places merely because American bought a small airline many have never heard of, and you have been sleeping on the floor with your kids for a couple of days in some airport 1500 miles from home, it is hard to see the pilots as being mistreated. . . . But what a Federal Judge can do, and what I will do, is make people pay for what they break. So if the activity and consequent damages continue, all the assets of the Union, including their strike war chest, will be capable of safely being stored in the overhead bin of a Piper Cub.¹³

Pitting the injured, consuming nuclear family against greedy union bureaucrats, Judge Kendall served pilots with a temporary restraining order against the sickout, held individual union leaders in contempt of court for organizing the stoppage, and awarded American Airlines $10 million in damages to cover the cost of the unrest. Though the appellate courts tempered this Texas judge’s stinging language, they upheld his punitive actions, eventually enforcing the largest damages award ever leveled against an airline union.¹⁴

While a court-orchestrated slap-down of union activism in the late 1990s is unsurprising, the American–Reno Air controversy stands out for the both inspiring and troubling new information it provides about labor solidarity amid the family values economy. On the one hand, the possibility of new austerity inspired vigorous labor activism. American publicly admitted that most of the pilots who came down with the subcontracting flu were not grizzled, senior jumbo-jet captains skipping posh layovers in Rio and Rome but young, newly hired domestic pilots.¹⁵ These junior crew members often lived in crowded airport “crash pads” with other new pilots and flight attendants sitting on call for predawn check-ins and grueling all-nighters. Challenging the inevitability of a new round of work speedups and defying provisions in labor law that make it much easier to fire a junior employee than a senior one, young employees risked a decade of training and apprenticeship to participate in the action.

On the other hand, as new bonds solidified between junior American Airlines pilots, new tensions emerged between employees across firms. Rather than fellow workers struggling to make it in a lean world, union activists at American figured Reno Air employees to be their economic adversaries, strangers at the gate threatening to cheapen pilot and flight attendant labor. This widening rift between unionized groups was most evident in American pilots’ and flight attendants’ refusal to negotiate a seniority integration deal for incoming Reno Air employees. By the spring of 1999, it had become clear that American management had backed off any intent to subcontract to Reno Air and instead was taking concrete steps to subsume all inherited flying under existing American Airlines union contracts. Nevertheless, labor leaders insisted that opening American’s contracts to rearrange seniority lists to accommodate newcomers from Reno Air aided and abetted management’s insidious commitment to subcontracting. In the process, long-standing union procedures guaranteeing workers fair and equitable seniority credit during corporate mergers were tossed out. Instead of granting Reno Air employees recognition for their years of labor aloft, pilot and flight attendant leaders argued that Reno Air employees should be placed at the bottom of the American roster: any other formula would be a “voluntary reduction”—and therefore violation—of original American employees’ seniority.¹⁶ American’s activists insisted that managers could use mergers and acquisitions as means to navigate a deregulated industry but that front-line employees should not have to take on the waylaid groups of workers created out of such connections.

Management, Unions, and the Practice of Confiscation

Although union leaders at American extended an olive branch to Reno Air flight attendants by going to the bargaining table and negotiating a small cash bonus for the lost seniority—workers got between $500 and $6,000, depending on how long they had been with Reno¹⁷—the unilateral action forcing newcomers to the bottom of the seniority list revealed something disturbing about labor activism as the millennium approached. As a consequence of the vast economic changes that had taken place since 1970, trade unionism was in some cases shifting from a generative practice to a confiscatory one. In the mid-1970s, the flight attendant union movement’s victories at American and TWA made the pie bigger for all working people. If American flight attendants won improved duty rigs in contract talks, for example, TWA flight attendants would mobilize for those same rigs. If American flight attendants got a pension bump, then American ticket agents would get the same bump. By making the pie bigger, labor activists generated economic resources for colleagues in other trades and for their peers at other airlines. But in a deregulated and financialized industry, and as subcontractors took over more flying every week, those resources were vanishing. As the flying disappeared, union leaders at American Airlines recognized that one way to defend what they had so passionately fought for in the 1970s was to divide the pie differently, making their own slice as large as possible even if that made other employees’ slices smaller. Subcontracting made activists less and less able to secure the resources necessary to allow flight attendants to be breadwinners, so some activists aimed to remedy the situation by confiscating those resources from other workers.

The new, defensive flight attendant unionism became the central dilemma of the American-TWA buyout in early 2001, a deal that was transforming the relationship between flight attendants, their colleagues at other airlines, and managers as the final details came together. Though American higher-ups, for example, cracked down on pilot activists in court after the Reno Air subcontracting flu, executives openly acknowledged that the labor movement had scored an advance during that fight. Recognizing the economic impact of the sickout, American managers admitted that they would have to respect pilots’ and flight attendants’ increasingly militant efforts to defend their seniority rights. American’s vice president of employee relations, Jeff Brundage, told a Senate panel:

As you well know, there was a very difficult occurrence in another acquisition by American [the Reno Air deal], and we had learned our lessons. We had learned our lessons that we would have to go out of our way to inform our employees that we understood what their contracts said. . . . There was no circumstance under which we would make the TWA asset acquisition if [legal protections for TWA crews’ seniority] were named because of the very tension they would have created with our own employees.¹⁸

Brundage clearly recognized that management had made a mistake in failing to adequately anticipate, acknowledge, and respect union contracts during airline consolidation. But to make up for that disregard, Brundage argued that American’s legal department must strip job security protections from incoming employees’ contracts, a move that would provide new protection for American employees against the incoming group from TWA. Brundage ceded no economic ground to the labor movement, offering no relief from the pay, benefit, and work rule givebacks that were the root cause of the dispute over subcontracting. Instead, he promised to shield his own employees by providing seniority protection during the industry’s ongoing race to the bottom.

Brundage’s promise—one that paradoxically transformed airline management from an architect of anti-unionism into a guarantor of unionized employees’ contractual rights—guided American Airlines executives as they made their bid for TWA. American managers designed a unique set of stipulations for TWA in advance of the sale, requirements that would help American’s employees protect themselves as economic resources continued to vanish. Most striking was a provision that forced TWA to file for bankruptcy before the deal closed. Rather than a simple reaction to TWA’s debt load, the TWA bankruptcy plan was hatched by managers at American to take advantage of Section 1113 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which allows companies to reject all or part of debt-generating contracts. American’s leadership team identified two cases where Section 1113 would be necessary for a successful merger. First, they filed a motion against Carl Icahn’s ticketing brokerage, which would protect the new company from Icahn’s ongoing effort to divert resources from TWA’s most valuable assets. Second and more troubling, American managers made an 1113 motion against the “Standard Labor Protective Provisions” (LPPs) in all collective bargaining agreements between TWA and its unionized workers.¹⁹

LPPs began to appear in airline union contracts during the push for deregulation in the 1970s. The provisions provided a safety net for employees when airlines reorganized during mergers, guaranteeing severance pay for those laid off, reimbursement for moving expenses during forced transfers, and a “fair and equitable” integration of union seniority lists. LPPs were originally enforced by the government, beginning in railroad labor relations in 1939, and first appeared in the airline industry with the proposed merger of United and Western Airlines in 1950. Government regulators sharpened and clarified LPPs in subsequent decades and standardized them after a particularly toxic labor dispute during the 1972 merger of Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Airlines and Ithaca-based Mohawk Airlines. The federal government then applied these “Allegheny-Mohawk” or “Standard” LPPs during airline mergers in the subsequent decade.²⁰ After the Airline Deregulation Act eliminated the federal agency that enforced LPPs, airline unions bargained with management and wrote Allegheny-Mohawk provisions directly into labor contracts. Though contractual language provided an important layer of insulation for workers, it left them newly vulnerable to the bankruptcy process because a single Section 1113 petition by management could invalidate workers’ only protection during industry consolidation.

By the middle of the 1990s, three worrying trends faced flight attendants during airline consolidation. First, confiscatory practices such as the subcontracting system put new economic pressure on unions and shrank the size of the pie that workers would divide among themselves. Second, to avoid engaging unions on substantive reforms that would mitigate falling wages, airline managers pitted employee groups against one another, offering to favor their own employees as they redistributed an ever-shrinking pool of resources. Finally, the transition to a deregulated airline industry eliminated government-backed Labor Protective Provisions, which left all workers newly vulnerable to unilateral action by both unions and corporations. As American Airlines managers completed the transaction and acquired bankrupt TWA, all three trends would haunt the new relationship between two flight attendant groups that had been close allies for three decades.

“What Are the Chances We Could Get Away with It?”

The convergence of upwardly redistributive political economic reforms in the airline industry had immediate repercussions for the American-TWA buyout. Amid widespread, legitimate fear that layoffs would follow the acquisition, rank-and-file American flight attendants deluged APFA headquarters with phone calls when the news hit the papers in December 2000. Worried that the incoming TWA group would displace American Airlines flight attendants, many callers demanded that APFA defend their jobs by denying seniority protection to TWA crews just as the union had done in the Reno Air deal. Copies of the TWA flight attendant seniority list—some circulated online by grassroots activists and others distributed by APFA itself—blew through the flight attendant ranks. Union members recoiled at TWA flight attendants’ seniority, a group with a disproportionate number of veteran workers when compared with American Airlines. Since 25 percent of TWA flight attendants had begun flying before 1970, and sixteen hundred people had been working for more than twenty-five years, American flight attendants knew that if the airline shrank, thousands of APFA members would lose their jobs.²¹

Management stoked American flight attendants’ fears. A February 2001 flight attendant meeting at JFK Airport, for example, was “all but out of control” after the base manager held up a copy of the TWA flight attendant seniority list, emphasizing the immense seniority of the new group.²² Susan French, chairwoman of APFA’s merger and acquisition committee, described a rapidly deteriorating situation in a letter to John Ward, the president of the union:

As you well know, our committee has been inundated with calls and letters from our membership. We have received well over 1000 telephone calls and emails. It has become quite clear to the M&A committee that the issue of the TWA seniority integration is a political bombshell with land mines everywhere one treads. At the same time, our research and investigation is leading us ever closer to the conclusion that stapling 4,000 TWA flight attendants to the bottom of our seniority list may be the most inappropriate move we can make, although it is exactly what our members want and expect.²³

Facing a wave of unrest, and working to remain faithful to their union’s long-standing identity as a proactive, member-driven organization that defends the economic self-interest of front-line workers, APFA struggled to craft an effective response to the TWA buyout. In the process, APFA leaders and members hardened their position against the TWA group as they began to consider the possibility of withholding credit for TWA flight attendants’ years of service by “stapling” them to the bottom of the APFA seniority list, a move that would leave the most senior TWA flight attendant below everyone from American. As she delivered a barrage of questions to APFA general counsel Steve Moldof, French pointed to a worsening political situation:

We’d like to know . . . the value, if any, of APFA becoming more involved in the [TWA] bankruptcy process. For example, can we endeavor to undo American’s promise to offer the TWA flight attendants jobs? . . . It is abundantly clear that 99.9% of our members want TWA flight attendants to go to the bottom of the seniority list, and that is exactly what they expect our union to do. Aside from the fundamental fairness issues raised by this position, what are the chances we could get away with it?²⁴

Although the law was French’s explicit premise, ethical questions shaped her query. Raising the “fundamental fairness” of a strategy that would help American Airlines “break its promise” to the TWA group, French struggled with the moral implications of an APFA decision to take a more punitive stance against TWA workers than management. In her framing of the seniority denial as an intervention to “get away with,” trade unionism became a nefarious practice that would transgress—rather than reinforce—long-standing solidarity among rank-and-file flight attendants.

As they struggled to find an effective means to defend themselves during industry consolidation, APFA leaders understood that they would have to make a historic decision. They could, on the one hand, honor the long-standing alliance between APFA and IFFA and offer full credit for TWA flight attendants’ years of service when they joined the merged airline. If they did so, however, union activists would have to be ready to ground thousands of their own colleagues at American Airlines. And perhaps more importantly, union leaders would have to override a groundswell of activism from members who—out of fear—were demanding that APFA staple TWA flight attendants to the bottom of the seniority list. American Airlines flight attendants had formed APFA and decertified the Transport Workers Union in 1977 precisely because male higher-ups had made union policy for four decades without effectively consulting an all-woman membership. If the Executive Board forced through a protective policy for TWA flight attendants, they would do so against the will of the majority of the rank and file, which would violate the democratic principles that had always been the foundation of APFA.

On the other hand, the union could defend its members’ self-interest by stapling TWA flight attendants to the bottom of the seniority list. Doing so would make APFA members virtually immune to layoff even if American dropped routes and subcontracted more flights, because all forty-three hundred TWA flight attendants would have to leave the property before the first APFA member was grounded. This defensive move would, however, severely undermine the political economic agenda that had been the bedrock of both APFA and IFFA. Work rules were the central goal of 1970s labor feminist flight attendant unionism because they provided a consistent, dependable monthly wage that allowed every flight attendant to be a breadwinner for her family for her entire career. But if APFA went through with the seniority stapling, an arbitrary event late in a flight attendant’s career, one that would take place with little notice and in a deeply inhospitable labor market for older women, it could end a flight attendant’s ability to provide for her family. If they lost their seniority, TWA flight attendants could be cast into the vast uncertainty of the family values economy, where they would be forced to strike a precarious balance between work and family as they cobbled together multiple low-wage service jobs.

On the night before the APFA Executive Board began formally debating the seniority stapling, veteran American Airlines flight attendant activist Tommie Hutto-Blake scribbled an impassioned message to her colleagues on the stationery pad from her hotel room in Euless, Texas. Hutto-Blake paper-clipped the note to an article from a 1976 volume of the American Civil Liberties Review titled “Stewardesses: From Sex Objects to Women’s Rights Activists.” The essay included images from sexually exploitative airline marketing campaigns and chronicled union activists’ effort to challenge the industry’s inequitable employment practices. The author of the article was Kathleen Heenen, a TWA flight attendant and founding member of IFFA and an activist in Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, the umbrella organization for feminist flight attendants from all airlines in the early 1970s. Hutto-Blake reminded her peers that flight attendants’ previous victories were possible only because of an overtly feminist coalition of American and TWA workers.

The TWA and American Airlines flight attendants have a shared history in our current struggle with Corporate America. Reflecting on this history will assist us in our current decisions. I urge the governing body to read and reflect on Heenen’s article before making one of the toughest decisions of your career as a union advocate.²⁵

Although she knew that potential layoffs and subcontracting made APFA leaders’ decision much harder than those facing activists in the 1970s, Hutto-Blake insisted that the long-standing political economic agenda of the flight attendant union movement should guide the union’s approach to seniority. For Hutto-Blake, the cross-airline solidarity that had turned flight attending from low-wage “women’s work” into a means to provide for a family was far more important than APFA members’ short-term economic self-interest.

Founding APFA member Patt Gibbs was even more pointed in her response. In a letter to President John Ward, Gibbs challenged the assumption that APFA had ever been a tool to represent flight attendants’ preexisting interests. Instead, Gibbs argued, 1970s labor feminists had built the movement around their own principled commitment to social justice, a commitment that was sometimes unpopular with the rank and file. Gibbs told Ward:

Sometimes [my politics] caused me to lose an election for Union office, but my principles were more important than any election. I am sure you remember hearing flight attendants say that the company didn’t like me because I was gay, or militant, or different looking, or mean, but so what.²⁶

Gibbs reminded Ward that since the airlines had limited hiring to women who fit squarely within the boundaries of traditional white femininity, most early-1970s flight attendants were indifferent to—or ambivalent about—the labor movement and women’s liberation. Although militant trade unionism and radical feminism were peripheral to most flight attendants’ lives, Gibbs and her activist friends understood that all flight attendants would benefit from the wage increases, the work rule improvements, and the family benefits that the 1970s radicals were demanding. For Gibbs, union leadership was never about simply representing what ordinary flight attendants wanted when they came to work for the airlines. Instead, core activists would draw on the leftist political projects of the 1970s to generate a new and far more ambitious set of interests among the membership. Through this constitutive role of the political, a marginal practice such as women’s liberation ended up heavily influencing all flight attendant unions’ agendas in the 1970s.

The question for the APFA Executive Board was how Gibbs’s observations about the 1970s should inform the practice of trade union democracy in an age when pro-family, pro-work values had remade the economy. Gibbs was abundantly clear that Ward and the rest of the APFA leadership team should be willing to make an unpopular decision to preserve the core principles of the movement, even if that decision cost them their elected offices. But as APFA leaders came together in a hotel adjacent to the sprawling Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport in late March 2001, most activists lacked Gibbs’s resolve. Twenty-first-century flight attendants understood that in a deregulated, financialized industry, managers were far more willing to pursue an aggressively anti-union strategy than they were in Gibbs’s day. The question for leaders, then, was how to preserve a space for democratic union practice amid these harsh new challenges.

“A Gross Injustice?”: Implementing the March 22 Protocol

With the rise of the family values economy, lifetime employment—which had been the defining feature of the U.S. industrial economy and the postwar middle class—was vanishing. After thirty years of anti-union jurisprudence, and with the growth of anti-union consulting firms that sold a broad array of products to help break promises between companies and workers, job security and retirement benefits could evaporate quickly and without warning. Though employers and not unions had designed these products, labor leaders were, in an increasing number of cases, able to take advantage of anti-union technologies as they adopted a defensive position against other workers. Therefore, although there had been a robust debate about the moral and strategic implications of the TWA flight attendant seniority stapling in the weeks leading up to the Executive Board meeting, the recent history of anti-unionism overwhelmed that debate once APFA leaders sat down in Dallas.

On March 22, 2001, with no dissenting votes, the Executive Board of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants ratified a protocol that would staple the TWA flight attendants to the bottom of the merged company’s seniority list.²⁷ That road map promised new security and mobility for the original American group, calling for “protections against furlough” and “preservation of the bidding seniority of the American Airlines flight attendants.” To purchase these privileges, the document demanded “non-credit for bidding seniority for TWA years of service in the event TWA flight attendants transfer from the fenced St. Louis and JFK bases.”²⁸ Members of the TWA group would receive credit for their years of labor aloft only if they stayed in their original bases in Saint Louis and New York and only during the months it took to finalize the operational merger. Once the deal was complete, the original American group would “preserve their seniority” by confiscating the seniority of all TWA flight attendants in all bases.²⁹

News of the March 22 protocol rattled flight attendants when it appeared on the APFA website and on the union’s HotLine phone network. Though airline seniority list mergers had always been contentious—accusations of internal wrongdoing, calls for union leaders to resign, rank-and-file lawsuits against labor leadership, and grassroots movements to relinquish union membership had plagued consolidation for decades³⁰—no flight attendant union had ever jettisoned all newcomers’ seniority on a wholesale basis. Flight attendants had always gotten something for their years of service, even if that something was a small cash payment as in the Reno Air deal.³¹

Given the unprecedented nature of the March 22 protocol, reactions by the affected parties varied widely. TWA flight attendants were, of course, devastated. Two years before the merger, TWA flight attendants had voted to leave the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants and join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). Well aware that the airline’s financial crisis had jeopardized all TWA flight attendants’ careers, rank-and-file activists had opted to join forces with a union with deeper pockets and a larger legal staff than small, independent IFFA. The tie-up had been tumultuous from the start, and TWA flight attendants had widely criticized their IAM leadership for a tepid and bungled response to the American deal, especially after the union voluntarily waived its contractual LPPs to grease the skids for a merger it insisted was the only means to save TWA union jobs.³² Nevertheless, Robert Roach, the general vice president of the IAM, vigorously responded to the March 22 protocol. In a letter to APFA, Roach blustered:

Without even giving [TWA flight attendants] the benefit of a phone call, you announced on your “hotline” that in effect the APFA Board of Directors had voted unanimously to unfairly represent and prejudice TWA flight attendants represented by this organization. Be advised that if APFA goes forward with its announced plan to discriminate against TWA flight attendants . . . and place them at the bottom of the American Airlines’ seniority list, we will take all legal measures available . . . to prevent this gross injustice.³³

While management was well aware of—and soon willing to stoke—the inter-union conflagration that Roach’s rebuke signaled, American’s labor relations department responded to the March 22 protocol as if nothing had happened. After all, every other airline merger had resulted in some sort of seniority negotiation process, and management knew that it would have to share the cost of hiring a neutral arbitrator to oversee such meetings. Robin Dotson, American’s managing director of employee relations, sent a brief and straightforward note to APFA nearly a month after the March 22 protocol, announcing the company’s readiness to begin a negotiation process despite the protocol’s apparent refusal of refereed meetings. Dotson told APFA:

In accordance with our commitment to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (“IAM”), we are currently in the process of choosing a neutral facilitator to meet with APFA and the IAM to discuss the seniority integration of TWA flight attendants. Please let me know as soon as possible when the APFA Merger & Acquisition Committee will be available in the next month for this meeting.³⁴

Two days later, on April 20, 2001, Dotson confirmed to both the IAM and APFA that American intended to hire Richard Kasher, a widely respected negotiations specialist who had bartered a seniority accord in the extremely contentious Pan Am–National Airlines merger of 1980,³⁵ to mediate seniority talks between the American and TWA flight attendants.³⁶ Over the coming days, Dotson, Roach, and Kasher coordinated their schedules and tentatively scheduled a summit meeting for late May in Philadelphia.³⁷

Logistical preparations for seniority negotiations ground to a halt on April 23, 2001, when APFA president John Ward sent a terse yet revealing letter to Robin Dotson. Ward reflected:

I have received your letters of April 18th and 20th.

As you know, APFA is not a party to any agreement reached between American Airlines and the IAM to retain a facilitator for the purpose of discussing the seniority integration of the TWA flight attendants.

As previously communicated, APFA intends to negotiate an Integration Agreement with the Company which is consistent with the guidelines set forth by the APFA Board of Directors on March 22nd, 2001.³⁸

Ward’s note to Dotson informed company higher-ups of APFA’s intent to scuttle the Philadelphia meetings by refusing to participate, insisting that APFA would not be a party to seniority talks between TWA flight attendants and American management, and that the final postmerger seniority list should be determined only in a private, unrefereed meeting between Ward and American’s labor relations department.

APFA never directly communicated with TWA flight attendants even as the union announced its intention to boycott the Philadelphia meeting. The only time Ward addressed the TWA group was in a half-page response to Roach’s public censure of the March 22 protocol. Ward told TWA flight attendants and the IAM:

The resolution adopted by the APFA Board of Directors represented its considered judgment as to how best to proceed with regard to the TWA transaction, consistent with its legal responsibilities. Rest assured that our Board gave careful attention to your presentations and the difficult issues presented. Contrary to the comments in your March 23rd letter, APFA has not taken steps to displace anyone, including TWA flight attendants who may become American flight attendants in the future, or to otherwise harm any flight attendants, and has not engaged in any “anti-labor activities.”

APFA has a long and proud history of providing outstanding representation to the American flight attendants and of joining with and supporting flight attendants and others who are employed by air carriers and other entities. . . . We look forward to continuing that course in the days ahead and to lending support and deriving support from our fellow labor unionists in the difficult times that lie ahead for us all.³⁹

Though Ward broadly and philosophically engaged Roach’s charge that APFA was preparing to violate labor’s timeless adage that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” he never made any reference—in this letter or in any other public venue—to the logistics of the seniority merge process or to plans for the neutral facilitation in Philadelphia. Instead, he left the merger at arm’s length, referring to TWA employees as “flight attendants who may become American flight attendants in the future,” even though the American Airlines Board of Directors had already approved the TWA purchase agreement and the closing was just fifteen days away.

Ward’s radio silence toward TWA flight attendants’ pleas for a pre-merger seniority summit reveals the legal foundations of APFA’s confiscatory strategy. American flight attendant leaders offered a new and strictly literalist interpretation of airline labor law, one that would exempt them from even discussing, much less arbitrating, the seniority issue with the TWA group or their IAM union leadership. APFA avoided seniority negotiations by placing TWA flight attendants in a troublesome legal time bind created by silences in the Railway Labor Act, the 1926 law governing labor relations on the railroads and airlines. APFA understood that in the letter of the RLA, there was no requirement for a union seniority summit during airline consolidation, even though one had taken place in every airline merger before the American-TWA affair.⁴⁰ The summit process was never written into the RLA because it was instead part of the government-guaranteed system of Labor Protective Provisions. But as TWA flight attendants were painfully aware, LPPs had stopped being enforced in the decade after deregulation.

Absent any legal or regulatory framework for seniority mergers, APFA simply made one up. Union leaders wagered that they could bypass the pre-merger summit process, going directly to American management and submitting a combined seniority list designed entirely by APFA with no input from TWA flight attendants. American managers would keep the document, set it aside while they prepared to merge the two companies, and then begin to honor it once the operational merger occurred. APFA activists thus emulated a non-union model of labor relations in which all personnel policy changes are made behind closed doors without input from front-line employees.

Though writing TWA flight attendants out of the seniority integration would appear to have been a glaring lack of due process, especially because TWA crews would soon become APFA members and pay APFA dues, labor policymakers had given the nod to similar practices in other industries. In a 1988 merger of Riser Foods and Rini-Rego Warehouse, two outfits in the grocery industry from suburban Cleveland, the National Labor Relations Board argued that time decides whether or not unions could make deals with management that would negatively impact the seniority and working conditions of future members.⁴¹ The board found that prior to the operational merger, prior to the moment the incumbent union begins representing the new members, the incumbent union can make any agreement it wants with management, even if that agreement would treat incoming members harshly. The company could then enforce this agreement after the operational merger. If it turns out that the agreement discriminates against incoming members, the board ruled that newcomers have no right to sue their new union because the agreement was made before they were members of that union.⁴²

Herein lies the time bind. Since airline consolidation creates immense logistical challenges, combining vastly different schedules, facilities, training procedures, and aircraft fleets, most mergers involve an interim period in which two airlines are financially linked but operationally separate. For the American-TWA deal, between April 10, 2001 (the date the sale closed) and July 2, 2003 (when the government officially certified that the two companies had become a single airline operation), TWA flight attendants would continue to work TWA airplanes, follow TWA procedures, and remain members of their old union, the IAM. At the same time, American flight attendants would fly American airplanes, follow American procedures, and stay in their pre-merger APFA bargaining unit. APFA would begin representing both groups only after the government officially ruled that the operational merger had occurred. The problem for TWA flight attendants was that in the Riser–Rini-Rego case, the board found that workers are legally entitled to equitable treatment from only their current union. APFA would thus be exempt from the duty to provide TWA flight attendants a fair and equitable seniority agreement because it did not represent the group at the moment it submitted the seniority list to American. Without being members of APFA, TWA flight attendants lacked a legal procedural basis to interrupt—or even weigh in on—that agreement even though they would be subject to its dictates once they began to fly for the merged company in July 2003.

The December 17 Accords: Dispossession and Inclusion in the 9/11 Era

The American-TWA merger spiraled from a dispute to a crisis with the events of September 11, 2001, violence that took place a mere six months after APFA ratified the March 22 protocol and before it signed a final seniority deal with management. The attacks on the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon, and on four United and American Airlines jetliners unleashed the worst economic upheaval in the history of U.S. aviation. The economic hemorrhaging was made much worse the following year by the run-up to the second war with Iraq. International air travel to and from the United States fell off 32 percent between November 2002—the beginning of the Bush administration’s final push for invasion—and the declaration of victory the following May.⁴³ With international travel in free-fall and the subcontracting system continuing to transfer flying away from big companies like TWA and American, all of the major airlines announced plans to seek deep economic concessions from all employees and to lay off thousands of flight attendants.

The situation was particularly intractable at American Airlines, where flight attendants had spent a year bogged down in a bargaining dispute with management. Six months before the 9/11 attacks, and while American was still turning solid profits, then-president Tommie Hutto-Blake warned all APFA members of a twofold crisis threatening the very survival of APFA. First, Hutto-Blake raised the possibility that management was preparing to force a flight attendant strike in an effort to break the union. “Management is not serious about concluding negotiations with a contract that the APFA membership could endorse,” Hutto-Blake’s “All-Call” recorded message told the rank and file. Second, management’s new relationship with TWA could be a powerful new weapon in this union-busting strategy. American could bait an APFA strike and then force employees from TWA—which American would own by April 2001—to permanently replace flight attendants on APFA picket lines. Conversely, American could subcontract lucrative international flying to TWA, eliminating the jobs of APFA members without the hassle of a strike and lockout.⁴⁴

The threatening tenor of negotiations provided deep incentives for APFA to pursue a strike-averting deal with American. The problem, of course, was that APFA had few cards to play at the bargaining table. The union had virtually no ability to credibly threaten a strike because rank-and-file members were desperate to protect their jobs amid downsizing rumors, skyrocketing unemployment, and anxieties about strikebreaking and subcontracting. Meanwhile, save for a successful public employee strike in Minnesota in October 2001, the intense nationalism and antiradicalism of the immediate post-9/11 era meant that strikes had all but vanished as a form of legitimate dissent, especially in the airline industry, which was the center of post-9/11 political and cultural anxieties.

American flight attendants did, of course, have one point of leverage they could use to bring order to the situation. APFA would make the final determination on the order of the new, combined American-TWA flight attendant seniority list. The quicker APFA resolved the seniority dilemma and provided the company with a new roster, the faster American could complete the costly interim period of the merger, proving to skittish investors that the two companies had become a single, efficient entity. Furthermore, the position of TWA flight attendants on the seniority list—whether credited for date of hire or stapled to the bottom—would deeply impact labor costs at the new airline. Since the TWA flight attendants were an older, senior group, their pay and vacation outlays would be much higher than those for junior people hired by American in the late 1990s.⁴⁵ If APFA stapled them to the bottom of the seniority list and made the TWA group the first in line for post-9/11 layoffs, American would score new cost competitiveness by being able to eliminate expensive, senior flight attendants at a moment when contracts forced United, Northwest, Continental, and other unionized carriers to restrict layoffs to lower-wage new hires.

This ominous political and economic context—of unprecedented financial turmoil in the airline industry, of APFA’s pressing desire to provide economic security for members by locking in a new contract, and of the potential labor cost savings of stapling TWA flight attendants to the bottom of the American seniority list—shaped a pact between APFA and American that sealed TWA flight attendants’ fate. On December 17, 2001, APFA president John Ward convened a meeting with the employee relations department of American Airlines, generating and signing two documents that would transform the tripartite relationship between American flight attendants, TWA flight attendants, and American Airlines. The first of these covenants was a concession by the company. In a letter titled “Agreement Prohibiting the Leveraging of TWA-LLC against the APFA,” American made a legally binding promise to refrain from using former TWA flight attendants as subcontractors or replacement workers in the broader contract dispute between APFA and the company. The agreement stipulated that once the federal government officially gave APFA the right to represent incoming TWA flight attendants, American would recognize former TWA employees as under the jurisdiction of the APFA contract and refrain from subcontracting to TWA. Furthermore, if APFA struck American Airlines as a result of failed contract negotiations, the airline would immediately shut the TWA operation down, making it impossible to retain TWA flight attendants as permanent replacement workers.⁴⁶

The second agreement between Ward and American managers was a quid pro quo for the first. In “Agreement on Seniority Integration and Related Matters between American Airlines, Inc., and Association of Professional Flight Attendants Representing the Flight Attendants of American Airlines, Inc.,” the company and the union agreed that all incoming TWA flight attendants would receive a classification seniority date of April 10, 2001, the date American’s purchase of TWA closed. Though the company complied with standard industry practices and agreed to honor TWA crews’ seniority for pay and vacation purposes, the accord meant that every TWA flight attendant—even one who had worked her first trip on a piston-driven Lockheed Constellation in 1957—would have just six months of seniority to protect her job in a rapidly downsizing industry, less seniority than all nineteen thousand flight attendants originally hired by American.⁴⁷

In an era when deregulation and financialization had thrown daunting hurdles in front of so many working people, American Airlines flight attendants won security and inclusion with the December 17 accords. When Ward signed the paperwork, APFA members were newly protected from the subcontracting system, sheltered from permanent replacement on the picket line, and cushioned from the mass furloughs impacting all other airline employees. The same pen strokes abandoned TWA flight attendants, exempting them from any remaining spoils of working for a powerful company like American. The interdependence between the December 17 documents’ illuminates the inequitable contours of the twenty-first-century economy, one in which a few working people gain mobility by upholding the upward redistribution of wealth, power, and resources that define the family values economy.

Despite the watershed that the December 17 accords delivered to TWA flight attendants, the agreement by no means mitigated the broader austerity facing APFA members. Though the pact removed the immediate threat of a lockout or wholesale subcontracting, the subsequent truce between APFA and management that the December 17 accords helped enable what became the most inequitable and unpopular contract settlement in American flight attendants’ history. That deal, solidified as caustic negotiations drew to a close in April 2002, rolled back most of the gains that American and TWA flight attendants had won in the late 1970s. APFA activists certainly took some consolation in preserving flight attendants’ defined benefit pension plan, retirement benefits that were stripped from peers at Delta, Northwest, United, and other major carriers, but they nonetheless reeled as total flight attendant compensation was slashed by another 30 percent. The most notable of the concessionary contracts’ many consequences was the dramatic speedup of flight attendant work, which came in the form of longer shifts, shorter layovers, fewer days off, less vacation and sick time, and smaller crews on every aircraft.⁴⁸

Work speedups also meant that about 20 percent of American flight attendants would, at least temporarily, lose their jobs, a burden borne almost entirely by older women who began their careers at TWA. Mass layoffs began on November 1, 2002, when 420 flight attendants—all former TWA—were ordered to turn in their badges and flight manuals and leave American Airlines. The furlough process gradually but steadily worked its way through the entire TWA flight attendant population: all 1990s hires were gone by New Year’s Day 2003, and only 1960s veterans were left by the end of the summer. Each new announcement meant that an older, more experienced group was faced with unemployment. When 259 TWA flight attendants got their pink slips on May 1, 2003, for example, they averaged 49.6 years old, with every furloughed flight attendant over age 40, and 42 percent of the group over 50. By the time the furlough process drew to a close at the end of the year, 3,394 TWA flight attendants were on long-term layoff from American Airlines, 1,500 of whom would never get their jobs back. The furloughed group averaged 51 years old, with 58 percent of those on layoff over 50. If TWA flight attendants had gotten full seniority credit during the merger, 3,085 of these flight attendants would have kept their jobs. The furloughed group would have averaged 36.8 years old, with just 12.3 percent of those in unemployment lines over 50, if date-of-hire seniority had been extended to TWA flight attendants, as it was in most other airline mergers.⁴⁹ These realities were most stark at Saint Louis, the airport where the majority of TWA crews were based. As the Saint Louis operation was depopulated in rounds of TWA layoffs, the airline brought in 900 original American hires as replacements, literally swapping out TWA bodies for American bodies and even forcibly transferring new American recruits from their Los Angeles and Miami stations to cover vanished TWA flight attendants’ work. The process was complete on July 2, 2003, when the last TWA flight attendant turned in her wings, grounded in what had become perhaps the bitterest inter-union conflict in the history of the U.S. airline industry.

Labor Feminist Legacies and the Push for McCaskill-Bond

APFA’s narrow commitment to the economic self-interest of its members helped make the American-TWA merger an immense setback for the flight attendant union movement. The grounding of former TWA workers but-tressed the airlines’ power over all flight attendants, regardless of which company they worked for. After the seniority denial, managers at every airline could use the threat of a merger and subsequent seniority loss to intimidate union members into taking further wage, benefit, and work rule concessions. Meanwhile, employers proved that they could ground a group of older women workers while avoiding legal sanction for age and sex discrimination. The TWA seniority stapling showed that management could roll back the watershed progress that 1970s flight attendant activists had made in eliminating airlines’ discriminatory recruitment and retention programs.

Despite the blow that the seniority crisis dealt to the movement as a whole, the American-TWA merger would not eliminate labor feminist flight attendant mobilization. Instead, flight attendants from across the industry leveraged the ideas and the infrastructure that they had built during three decades of activism to challenge TWA workers’ grounding. Flight attendants recognized that the political successes of the feminist and antiracist movements of the 1960s and 1970s could provide an opportunity to contest the seniority denial. Although the rise of pro-family, pro-work politics in the late 1970s reversed most of their unions’ political economic advances, flight attendants knew that many previous legal gains had been institutionalized. After Title VII banned sex discrimination in the workplace, after corporate Equal Employment Opportunity statements formally welcomed female job applicants, and as corporate diversity rhetoric touted the value of women in the workplace, blatant sex discrimination had been cast outside the boundary of legitimate business practice by the year 2000. Though there was no consensus about the pay and benefits that a woman deserved on the job, most of the public and many employers agreed that a worker should not be fired simply because of her age or sex.⁵⁰ Therefore, TWA flight attendants appealed directly to public officials, insisting that the government reinforce its commitment to equal opportunity at work by banning seniority denials like the one that took place during the merger.

Flight attendants began to countermobilize in TWA’s former hometown of Saint Louis, where thousands of workers’ personal lives were in crisis after the mass layoff. Twenty-two-year veteran TWA flight attendant Roger Graham describes the political and emotional context of a new initiative he and his colleagues formed:

I was at home one night. I was with another flight attendant who was going through a difficult personal time because of the [postmerger] layoff and this really pissed me off. And I went into the bedroom and I told my partner how much this angered me. We had no money—but we decided to go down to Dallas and picket our own union for doing nothing to get us back.⁵¹

Graham and a dozen other displaced flight attendants decided to travel to the Dallas headquarters of APFA, setting up picket lines in front of their new union and demanding that the organization invalidate the December 17 accord and renegotiate a fairer seniority integration agreement. Only forty people showed up, but since they had all spent precious time and money on the trip, they cultivated a new network of dedicated activists who would focus on finding new opportunities to challenge the seniority stripping.

Well aware the APFA would not reverse the seniority stapling, and seeing an opportunity to link the mass layoff to broader principles of fairness and equality that remained dominant after the 1960s, Graham and his colleagues shifted their focus toward electoral politics. During the summer of 2006, polls showed that the Senate race in the state of Missouri was in a dead heat. Incumbent Republican Jim Talent faced a vigorous challenge from upstart Democrat Claire McCaskill in a year that was swinging toward the Democrats nationally. TWA flight attendants learned that Talent would debate McCaskill on public television in the Saint Louis suburb of Clayton, Missouri. The activists who met at the Dallas protest contacted both Senate campaigns, telling Talent and McCaskill that they would deliver the votes of all twelve thousand displaced TWA employees in Missouri to whichever campaign came up with a better plan to remedy the mass layoff. Activists obtained ten seats for TWA workers in the small television studio and submitted a question about the layoff that the moderator promised to ask during the debate. Meanwhile, ninety additional TWA flight attendants rallied with bullhorns and signs outside the venue, drawing attention to their cause despite a driving rain and forty-knot winds.⁵²

Though both candidates paid lip service to the injustice of the TWA affair on camera, only McCaskill was versed enough in labor and employment policy to sketch a means to not only overturn the layoffs but also prevent the situation from recurring at another employer. A week later, Roger Graham—who had taken the lead on the Missouri Senate strategy—met with Mc-Caskill to review and finalize her legislative commitment to flight attendants.⁵³ Her intervention proved acceptable to Graham and the other leaders, who publicly promised to deliver the votes while posing for a media photo-shoot with McCaskill holding a model of a TWA Boeing 767.⁵⁴ McCaskill’s pledge paid off politically: she upset Talent in the November general election, beating the incumbent by forty thousand votes as a deeply energized former TWA workforce turned out en masse to support her.

McCaskill quickly delivered on her promise to Graham’s cohort in two ways. First, she called APFA leaders and American Airlines managers into a meeting, persuading the union and management to draw up an extension of “recall rights” for furloughed TWA flight attendants. Under the then-current APFA contract, grounded flight attendants would be first in line for new openings for five years after layoff. Since many TWA flight attendants had been grounded in mid-2002, those “recall rights” began expiring in 2007. The McCaskill deal moved those recall rights back to seven years, allowing the industry twenty-four additional months to recover from the 9/11 slump. The extension, however, would cover only the twelve hundred TWA flight attendants still on the recall list in December 2007, allowing American to permanently dump the fifteen hundred who had already passed the five-year mark. Many TWA flight attendants—especially veterans who had fought Carl Icahn and won the recall of every single striker during the 1986 lockout—scoffed at the deal, insisting that it violated the basic principle of the labor movement that an injury to one is an injury to all.⁵⁵

McCaskill’s other initiative drew much broader support among the TWA group and was far more historically significant. Joining forces with Missouri’s other senator, Republican Kit Bond, McCaskill aimed to write key components of the Allegheny-Mohawk Labor Protective Provisions back into federal law. McCaskill’s bill would restore the sections of Allegheny-Mohawk that guaranteed workers “fair and equitable” seniority credit during mergers and acquisitions. By pulling this particular language out of Allegheny-Mohawk, TWA activists and McCaskill were able to insert seniority policy into the broader cultural consensus around “fairness” and “equity” while avoiding the political backlash that would inevitably follow a pro-worker government regulation during the neoliberal era. To build support for the bill in Congress, TWA activists joined forces with the legislative affairs department of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), another large flight attendant union that had spent decades lobbying for government seniority protection. Doing so gave the grounded TWA group the political and institutional support of flight attendants from United, US Airways, Alaska, and twenty other airlines. Since the bill was vulnerable to veto by openly anti-union president George W. Bush, the coalition of AFA and TWA activists slid the McCaskill-Bond legislation into the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008, an omnibus bill with bipartisan support in Congress. The strategic move guaranteed McCaskill-Bond’s amendment easy passage.⁵⁶ Though all flight attendants would continue to face the daunting challenge of working in a deregulated, financialized industry, TWA activists successfully stripped management of its ability to use the merger process to wield age and sex as means to divide and dispossess the flight attendant union movement.

Conclusion: The Challenge of Labor Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

Twelve years after the TWA buyout, and as the pain of losing their seniority still rankled former TWA flight attendants, American Airlines announced its next major strategic move as it worked to adapt to the permanent flux of a deregulated, financialized industry. On July 12, 2013, the shareholders of US Airways agreed to sell the company to American. US Airways had a strong presence in the growth markets of the U.S. Southeast and was itself an amalgamation of carriers that had chosen consolidation as a means to mitigate previous industry turmoil: Allegheny, America West, Mohawk, and PSA, among others. After the merger announcement, APFA once again had to decide how to integrate a new group of flight attendants into American Airlines. Unlike its decision in the TWA case, the union gave all former US Airways flight attendants credit for their previous years of service as they began their new jobs at American. Thanks to McCaskill-Bond, APFA was required to provide “fair and equitable” seniority protection to its new members. Senior US Airways flight attendants will continue to have first pick of lucrative international schedules once they join American and will have protection from layoff if the new company shrinks. Because of the law that TWA flight attendants helped write, APFA has been able to focus on the wage and work rule goals that unite all flight attendants rather than on the seniority issues that divide them. Even in an age when the labor movement is a third the size that it was in the 1970s, and even after feminist and gay activists’ bold critiques of domesticity and family have faded from mainstream political debate, flight attendant union activism successfully protected the careers of tens of thousands of older workers who otherwise might have lost their seniority.

As McCaskill-Bond helped US Airways flight attendants keep their jobs, and as it allowed them to join their new colleagues at American as peers rather than subordinates, the flight attendant union movement proved that workers could still create political economic change in the twenty-first century. TWA flight attendants’ perseverance discourages us from reading Chantal Mouffe’s work in economic determinist terms—from assuming that a neoliberal economy inevitably produces defensive, ineffective unionism. TWA activists’ ability to reorient the debate in a time of crisis is exactly why Mouffe is hopeful about the political conflict that stems from democratic practice. For Mouffe, political debate—even when that debate is as caustic as it was in the wake of the TWA affair—is a positive, generative consequence inherent in the tension between liberty and equality that exists in every democracy.⁵⁷ There would have been no way to fully resolve the conflict between American Airlines’ flight attendants’ basic economic self-interest and a fair seniority deal for TWA workers. But it was political mobilization itself that opened a space for labor feminist flight attendants to act and allowed McCaskill-Bond to be the permanent, equitable consequence of the dispute.

The continued power of TWA flight attendants’ insistence that every flight attendant deserves to be a breadwinner for her family for her entire career does not mean, however, that resurrecting 1970s-style labor feminism will save the flight attendant union movement. Though union contracts like those at United and American continue to allow some flight attendants to provide for their families, most new airline jobs are being created at discount airlines and subcontractors, where wages are low and work rules are scant. Meanwhile, thousands of other flight attendants who once worked for Eastern, Braniff, TWA, and other carriers have been displaced from the industry and are struggling to make ends meet with multiple, low-wage service jobs. Subcontracted flight attendants and other service employees have few of the resources that enabled 1970s activism; in many cases they lack union representation and the support of a broad-based social justice movement. Those workers, however, are living lives similar to those that 1970s activists politicized. They are waiting to marry, cohabitating with friends, having children while single, and using the household as a space to pool the economic resources of jobs that don’t pay the bills. In an age when the domestic sphere has become a heavily leveraged place that mitigates economic uncertainty as much as it facilitates intimate relationships, the flight attendant union movement’s long-standing critique of the family values economy is more relevant than ever. The question for activists, then, is how to make the movement’s labor feminist past relevant to a new generation of workers who were never involved in the upsurge of the 1970s. I take up this question in the Epilogue.