Since the early 1970s, neoliberal reforms have transformed the production of knowledge about political economy.1 Deregulation, privatization, and other market-oriented policy changes have made it considerably more difficult to procure accurate information about big business.2 As Chapter 4 argues, for example, financialization reduced the number of stakeholders with the power to influence airlines’ operational practices. When Carl Icahn, Frank Lorenzo, Alfred Checci, and other Wall Street bankers staged hostile takeovers of major carriers in the 1980s, they bought off boards of directors, fired existing management teams, closed crew bases, and locked out unionized workers. As the new executives eliminated jobs, many employees—both in middle management and among the rank and file—were forced to leave the industry on short notice, which prevented them from continuing to intervene in airlines’ affairs from the inside. Rapid staffing changes and an increasingly insulated corporate decision-making process have meant that there are far fewer informants with the access to privileged information that had previously been crucial for scholars who study economic and social change. To meet the challenge of a business environment that often obscures good data, this project uses an interdisciplinary methodology that has three parts: ethnography, archival research, and historical analysis of legal and legislative documents.
The most important factor in the research strategy for this book is my own lifelong connection to the airline industry. From the time that I was a small child, I had a strong interest in aviation. By the early 1980s, and with the support of patient parents, I was taking weekly trips to the airport in my hometown—Minneapolis–St. Paul International—to watch the planes take off and land. Those years were politically turbulent, and on more than one occasion I stood and watched throngs of angry Eastern Airlines flight attendants, pilots, and ground workers chanting, “EASTERN YES! LORENZO NO!” and selling buttons and T-shirts with Lorenzo’s name circled and crossed out. The strikes at Eastern, TWA, Continental, and other carriers were on the television news with great regularity, and for an aviation-centered young person, they were the background of my childhood.
I eventually turned that interest into a career, and in September 1998, I was hired as a flight attendant for United Airlines, flying out of the Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco crew bases during a five-year career. I became a union activist soon after I joined the company, and in June 2001 I was elected council representative for Association of Flight Attendants Council 11 in San Francisco. Through my work as an internal organizer and grievance representative, I made connections to union leaders at most of the major and regional airlines. Many of those people had participated in the women’s, gay, and lesbian liberation movements and had led the flight attendant upsurge of the 1970s. By the year 2000, those seasoned activists had become political and intellectual mentors for my younger generation of union leaders. After I left the airline industry, and once I began doing research for my Ph.D. dissertation in American studies, many of those mentors agreed to become informants for my work. The ethnographic component of the book is, therefore, not a random sample of flight attendants. Instead, I intentionally interviewed activists who had played pivotal roles in many of the industry’s most transformative moments.
For the approximately thirty activists who were respondents for the project, I conducted what Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer Pierce, and Barbara Laslett have theorized as “life history interviews.”3 Instead of using a detailed, standardized questionnaire for all participants and limiting interviews to oral historical accounts of particular organizing drives or strikes, I structured the interviews with open-ended questions that aimed to uncover information about each respondent’s entire life course. Those questions included but were not limited to the following: What was your family life like as a child? Why did you become a flight attendant? Why did you get involved in political activism? How has your job and your activism shaped your relationship to your friends, lovers, and children? By asking these general questions, I let the flight attendants decide which events they thought were most important in their personal lives as well as in the history of the airline industry. The interviews were all relatively long; the shortest took place in a single two-hour sitting, and several stretched over multiple meetings on multiple days. I let all the activists choose the setting for their interviews, which allowed me to conduct ethnographic fieldwork at our meetings. One flight attendant, for example, cooked me dinner in the kitchen of the house that she had bought with one of the big raises of the late 1970s. Another took me to the Kansas City law firm where she had helped plan a strike. An activist who was not a flight attendant but who had worked with flight attendants in the gay liberation movement allowed me to conduct our entire interview where he worked: the engine repair shop at United Airlines’ maintenance base in San Francisco. The visual and spatial context provided an interpretive tool that deepened my understanding of activists’ descriptions of their own lives.
Every flight attendant I interviewed was passionate as she or he described the challenge of being an activist in a deregulated, financialized industry. But while those recollections provided detail and nuance that would never have been available in an archive or a newspaper, my respondents’ emotional investment in the subject matter also suppressed information. All of the interviewees for the book had been dispossessed in some way, losing their careers, being forced to move away from family and friends, or being stripped of their pensions. Dispossession provoked visceral anger in these workers—anger at airline managers, at union leaders, and even at coworkers and friends who had different reactions to trauma. Because of this painful context, some activists used the interview process as a platform to “set the record straight”—and to advocate for their own version of deeply contested events. One person was highly transparent about the fact that she had prepared for the interview and had decided ahead of time which details about her union’s past she would reveal and which she would hide. “For official purposes, you have to tell the version of the story you want to last,” she told me as we began to talk.4
That flight attendant’s strategic narration by no means invalidates her testimony. Instead, it provides an incitement to search for other “versions of the story” that might complement or contradict her analysis. Archives facilitated that search and thus became the book’s second methodological foundation. A number of professionally curated collections have extensive holdings about the major airlines from the post-1970 period. The Tamiment Library Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, for example, possesses troves of information from the flight attendant unions at Pan Am, Eastern, Southern, TWA, and other major carriers. The Tamiment offers generous travel fellowships, and after winning one of those grants, I spent a month doing full-time research in its collection. In other cases, unions manage their own collections: the Association of Professional Flight Attendants at American Airlines employs a professional archivist at its Dallas headquarters to catalog its historical documents, and the Association of Flight Attendants houses much of its recent material in its local union offices. Both APFA and AFA were gracious in granting me access to those materials. APFA, for example, allowed me to spend a week working long days in its archive, using the scanner, the copier, and the coffeemaker even as activists were busy crafting an emergency response to their employer’s economic crisis.
Although traditional collections with finding aids provided much of the data for this project, the airline industry’s recent instability has limited the scope of those archives and has produced wide lacunae in their holdings. In 1997, for example, TWA flight attendants decided to change unions. After a long and often bitter disagreement over which union would better meet flight attendants’ needs, the IAM, which became the victor in the dispute, stopped paying rent on the previous union’s office. The landlord terminated the lease for nonpayment and dumped the contents of the office—including the union’s archive—into a landfill.5 Therefore, there is no professionally curated archival collection of the materials from TWA flight attendants’ daunting and headline-making journey through the 1980s. Copies of some of those documents still exist in private collections, and the holdings of Mary Ellen Miller, Kaye Chandler, and Paula Mariedaughter were therefore crucial to the development of Chapter 4 of this book.
Like their trade union counterparts, the major carriers also have archives. Delta and American, for example, house their records in sprawling museums that celebrate these companies’ role as innovators in global aviation. But after the contentious politics of the past four decades, and because employers have been reticent to share information that could benefit the push for labor, environmental, and safety regulation, the airlines provide only deeply restricted access to their materials. Delta Airlines, for example, granted me access to only documents dating from 1941 or earlier, which despite the prompt and charming response from the company’s archivists, was wholly unhelpful to a scholar studying the post-1970 period.
Corporations undoubtedly restricted the flow of information as they broke commitments to cities, workers, and retirees. Nevertheless, the ensuing disputes left a dense paper trail. That trail, which exists in the courts, in congressional records, and in the media, provides the third methodological foundation for this book. By the early 1980s, changing managerial practices in the airline industry provoked a flurry of lawsuits between individual carriers, unions, former executives, shareholders, the Securities and Exchange Commission, consumer groups, and overseas governments. As those cases wove their way through federal district courts, the appellate courts, and even the U.S. Supreme Court, they produced reams of documentation. During the same period, and although Ronald Reagan’s presidency is sometimes remembered as uncontested, Democrats—many of whom were still solidly pro-union and from self-identified working-class districts—held a majority in one or both houses of Congress. They assailed Reagan’s antilabor agenda and convened congressional hearings on most of the period’s airline disputes, which produced tens of thousands more pages of sworn testimony from managers, workers, union leaders, and regulators. Those materials, and the throng of Wall Street Journal reporters who meticulously covered one of the most tumultuous industries in one of the most tumultuous periods in the financial history of the United States, provide information that fills many of the gaps in archival collections and in individual workers’ recollections of the period. Therefore, while scholars will probably never know exactly what Wall Street financiers said to their lawyers as they mobilized against airline unions, documents from the courts, Congress, the SEC, and the media provide a fairly clear picture of how money and power flowed through their enterprises.
The wealth of information about the ongoing crisis in the airline industry reveals that writing contemporary history—which this book most certainly is—can be a rigorous, methodical process even though it is contested. The history of the present comes with undeniable pressures. Most of the stakeholders described in this project are still alive and are deeply invested in the narrative that I have produced. Regardless of whether those stakeholders are elite airline CEOs or grassroots union organizers, they are staunch advocates for their own political positions and are committed to refuting their opponents’ ideas. Nevertheless, as they made their arguments, corporate managers, union leaders, feminists, and queer activists delivered a wealth of information about the contemporary period. Although Carl Icahn, for example, left no formal archive of his involvement with Continental, TWA, and other airlines, he told his story to the public in vivid detail. Whether on the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine or on the witness stand in Congress, he admitted that he wanted to drastically reduce flight attendant wages and to enforce deeper cuts on flight attendants than on other airline workers. In Icahn’s case, historians don’t need to search the archives for a smoking gun, because he admitted both the motivation and the method for the crime. There is, of course, far more to Icahn’s story than he presented on the pages of a fashion magazine, which is why I used ethnographic, archival, and legal and legislative research to offer a different framework for the contemporary period than that of Icahn and his Wall Street cohort. By using an interdisciplinary methodology, this book offers a thorough explanation for the history of the present while preserving the complexity of the period.