The Sleeping Giant That Could Stop Trump’s Agenda in Its Tracks

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Sara Nelson became a public figure in January 2019. At the time, the federal government was shut down after President Donald Trump refused to sign a congressional spending bill. A lot of people were out of work, and it severely affected air travel. That’s when Nelson—a flight attendant and president of the Association of Flight Attendants—first made the case for a general strike.

It’s a cause she’s rallying behind again as the Trump administration threatens various facets of the country. The administration’s actions on immigration and its firing of federal workers have drawn condemnation from all sorts of unions, from building trades to graduate students. What happens when labor speaks as one?

On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris talked to Nelson about how collective action could be the silver bullet to fight Trump’s agenda. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Things are complicated now. Starting with the Transportation Security Administration, the Trump administration is threatening the collective bargaining rights of almost every federal employee, saying it’s a national security threat. And when you don’t have those rights, it just … drains the life force of a union. Federal workers cannot strike because if they strike, they can be fired, and they could also never be rehired by the federal government. There’s a lot of risk to striking. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sara Nelson: When you look at what Trump is doing to cancel the TSA contract, they did that hoping that people wouldn’t care, because in general, people don’t like going through TSA. He then did it for another 700,000 federal workers in different agencies, saying that they don’t have the right to collective bargaining because they’re security-sensitive. It’s the most absurd, ridiculous argument.

But what’s more important here is that they’re doing it. They’re saying to the rest of corporate America: “Rip up union contracts.” This is the biggest attack in history on the labor movement. We should already be striking. There should already be a consciousness.

We’re not there. We’re going to have to build to that. We have to talk about it, and we can’t be afraid to say it. I have been in union circles where people have said, “Don’t say the S-word.” I’m like, “Yes, say strike. Strike, strike, strike.” It feels good. I feel the power from workers.

Your members are connected to all kinds of things that are happening at the federal level right now. People are being taken out of the country on chartered planes. And there’s a budget airline, Avelo, which signed a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. But their flight attendants are represented by your union. How do you use a moment like that to build union power right now? 

I can talk about the people that I directly represent, but this applies anywhere. The building trade unions are waking up to the evils of this mass deportation policy because their member, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, has been deported to El Salvador, mistakenly. The Supreme Court has said he needs to come back, and the Trump administration is denying that.

The building trades have been traditionally sort of conservative. But they’re starting to speak in more militant terms.

I was struck by the fact that a joint statement came out linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was working in the building trades, with graduate students who had been deported. And it was two or three unions, releasing a statement together, saying: “We need to protect our members.” This is a new thing. It’s linking people across class. It’s linking people across circumstances, and across unions. What do you make of this?

Union members can’t improve their own conditions without standing with the other people that they work with. So there’s an automatic connection right there. In 2019, we had a member who had been detained by Border Patrol and sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It was a private prison that she was sent to for six weeks. And all of a sudden, all of our members who had been thinking that the immigration policy was something that they wanted or needed, or were following Trump, suddenly saw the detainment of this member in themselves and they could relate to it. And it broke through, and we were able to get her out.

And your flight attendants who are on these deportation flights, are they seeing things like people chained in the seats?

We’re not seeing that yet. Those flights haven’t started yet for Avelo. This has happened at another nonunion carrier. We are saying to Avelo: “You’re going to hurt the airline. That is going to hurt our members’ jobs, too, and you’re going to hurt the country. You are going to be known as the deportation airline.”

We are going to do a lot more organizing around this. Sixty-seven percent of the flight attendants at Avelo said they will not work these flights. They do not want to work these flights. And we’re going to continue to organize around that.

When I think about the problem of a general strike right now, what I think about is the ask unions would make, or what the general public wants. Because if you’re involving lots of different people, people who are not organized in a union, the ask at the end of the day is an open question. Isn’t that right?

In 2019, it was very clear there was one demand: open the government. But more and more people are getting affected by this. And I think the demands are pretty darn clear here, right? Reinstate all collective bargaining agreements, reinstate people to their jobs, stop with the illegal deportation and denial of due process. And also, we’re in this place because people don’t have homes. So let’s enact the Economic Bill of Rights that FDR put forward 80 years ago. It’s really simple. A job with a living wage, a decent home, health care, protection against any [economic insecurities from] disability or unemployment or old age, and an education. I mean, those are the demands, and it’s really, really simple. This is what people want.

How will you know when we’re ready to hit the streets?

We run our strikes as chaos strikes.

What’s a chaos strike? 

So, we created chaos strikes because in the Railway Labor Act, we have the ability to do intermittent strikes. We said, We’re not going to tell you when or where we’re going to strike. We can strike anywhere at any time. And at Alaska Airlines, we ended up only striking seven flights, and we brought the airline to their knees and won a contract that gave most of the flight attendants a 60 percent raise.

So you’re not going to tell me when you’ll know? 

I’m not. It’s a secret plan. The element of surprise is important. The whole idea here is that working people are taking control and setting the agenda. And so we’re not going to say when or where or what that exact moment is going to be, but we’re planning for it and talking about it, and we’re going to strike at the right time.

There has to be a consciousness, and there has to be a clear demand. And those demands are going to be defined very clearly by what’s happening with this administration, but also by working people and unions talking about that.

I was at a secret meeting recently about this, and talking about what those demands need to be. In other countries, it has been labor that has been the central force pushing this forward. If you look around and you look at history and at what has happened around the world, it has to come from the labor movement.