From improving pay and benefits to advocating for better working conditions, labor unions help workers in many ways. The advantages of labor unions are particularly evident in the airline industry, one of the most heavily unionized industries in the United States. At three of the four largest airlines — American Airlines, Southwest and United — between 80% and 85% of the workforce is unionized. This compares to a rate of about 11% in the rest of the country. At Delta, the fourth of the big four carriers, only pilots and dispatchers are unionized. To maintain its non-union status in the face of recurrent organizing drives by various airline unions, Delta pays as well as or better than competitors.
Some statistics from the industry trade group, Airlines for America, make the benefits of union representation clear. A4A, as the group is known, sometimes works with the unions in coalitions of convenience. At other times, it battles them. In any case, according to A4A, in 2024 U.S. passenger and cargo airlines had about a million workers, their largest workforce ever. Their average salary in 2023 was $117,400 annually, 47% higher than the $80,100 earned by the average private sector employee. Additionally, union membership often brings benefits such as better health care and a grievance procedure where disagreements can be addressed by equal parties, rather than by management acting alone. Beyond salary and benefits, unionized airline employees typically have a say in their scheduling, an essential component to their quality of life. However, airlines’ 24-hours a day, seven-days a week operations mean that workers who have low seniority will likely have to work during holidays when most people just want to be at home with their families.
Cover of Unions Flying High: Airline Labor Power in the 21st Century
My new book, Unions Flying High: Airline Labor Power in the 21st Century, draws on my 35 years of covering airlines as a reporter for The Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, The Street, Forbes and other publications. The book focuses on leaders or former leaders of the top six airline labor unions. Combined, the Association of Flight Attendants and the Association of Professional Flight Attendants represent nearly 100,000 flight attendants. The Air Line Pilots Association and the Allied Pilots Association represent about 90,000 pilots. The International Association of Machinists and the Transport Workers Union represent about 120,000 mechanics and fleet service workers. Of course, they are all best known by their initials – AFA, APFA, ALPA, APA, IAM and TWU.
The key airline industry labor leaders are AFA President Sara Nelson, ALPA President Jason Ambrosi and TWU President John Samuelsen. They started at the bottom, respectively, as a flight attendant, a regional jet pilot and a New York subway worker, and they worked their way up in their jobs as well as in their unions. Their stories are testaments to the democracies that exist within the labor movement, where leaders must win elections if they want to move up.
Perhaps the most impressive recent display of the advantage of union membership came when the airlines and their unions worked together to secure $60 billion in payroll support from Congress during the pandemic. The assurance of regular paychecks from employers provided a lifeline during a period of intense uncertainty. In seeking support from Congress for the funding, A4A and labor worked together. The airlines’ most essential partner was Sara Nelson. At one crucial moment in the spring of 2020, when the industry was faltering in the early days of the pandemic, American Airlines CEO Doug Parker told his fellow CEOs they were not going to get the congressional help they needed if they did not work with Nelson and the unions.
At the time, Nelson — president of a relatively small union of 50,000 members, most of whom are women – was perhaps the country’s most prominent labor leader. By 2023, the labor movement was reasserting its importance, and Teamster President Sean O’Brien and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain had also ascended in national prominence. But in 2020, Nelson was better known than either. Additionally, she had a presence in Washington, DC, the home of two major unions that are composed entirely of airline employees: AFA and ALPA.
A United Airlines flight attendant since 1996, Nelson often dresses in a United flight attendant uniform. She has long been willing to do the hard work of a union leader, which includes traveling constantly to labor events, engaging regularly with Congress and other labor leaders, and being available whenever reporters call. Ask Nelson to appear on your 10 p.m. cable news TV program, your Sunday morning program or your evening network news program, and she is likely to say “yes.” Ask for an interview for your newspaper story or your blog, and she is likely to say “yes” to that as well. Or ask for an off-the-record explanation of some airline industry practice, and she will explain it, because she is steeped in the passenger airline industry.
The payroll support program came in three tranches: the first was $34 billion, part of the $2.2 trillion Cares Act, which was approved by Congress in March 2020. At the time, the U.S. economy had largely collapsed, the airline industry had totally collapsed, and fear gripped the world. Yet, only the airline industry was singled out by Congress for payroll protection for its workers.
Said Nelson during an interview for my book, “[w]e were the only ones putting forward a plan that put workers first. It showed that when we set the agenda and use our power, we can make the corporate elite come in our direction, rather than allowing them to determine the world’s economic fate. We were the only industry not to have an increase in inequality during the pandemic. In every other industry, workers and executives grew further apart in average pay. That’s because unions are the best countervailing force against the greed of capitalism. Capitalism is about profits and unions are about people. In a democracy, you can form unions and can fight against the worst forces of unchecked capitalism in order to make a more fair society.”
The labor movement has a proud history of backing important social movements. ALPA and AFA have long been key advocates for airline safety. AFA and APFA have helped to lead the movement of women into the workforce. Mike Quill, a founder of the TWU, immigrated to New York from Ireland in 1926 and went to work in the subways. At the time, working conditions were horrible, wages were low, and the private subway companies employed infiltrators to guard against strikes. Quill worked to improve conditions and also became an early supporter of Martin Luther King Jr.
Fifty years later, in 2017, John Samuelsen was elected TWU international president. By that time, the union’s largest membership was at American Airlines. Samuelsen started as a subway track inspector, worked his way up to president of TWU’s Local 100, and then became international president. He told me that Mike Quill is among his heroes. In May 2019, at a memorable public meeting with Robert Isom, who later became American’s CEO, Samuelsen said if TWU were ever to strike American, it would “engage in absolutely vicious strike action against American Airlines, to the likes of what you’ve never seen, not organized by airline people but organized by a guy that came out of the New York City subway system that’s well inclined to strike power and who understands that the only way to challenge power is to aggressively take it to them.”
The IAM led the best-known strike in airline industry history in 1989 against Eastern Airlines. It came after the carrier locked out the union’s members. Within days, the other unions followed. The leader of IAM Local 100, which had 10,000 members, was Charlie Bryan. Initially, when I took over the airline beat for The Miami Herald, he refused to talk with me, so I worked with his chief lieutenant. In 1996, five years after Eastern shut down, I wrote a story on Bryan and got to know him. I wrote his obituary for Forbes in 2013. It began: “The labor movement has produced its share of heroes, but it’s hard to say whether Charlie Bryan was among them. Bryan was a leader of the most dramatic labor conflict in the history of the airline industry, but 24 years later it is impossible to say whether he won or lost.”
Unions Flying High: Airline Labor Power in the 21st Century is available through McFarland & Company.
