Labor Union Blog

More than 100 representatives from unions representing better than 90,000 flight attendants at 26 U.S. airlines began work last week on joint strategy to raise the standard for wages, retirement, health care, benefits and working conditions for all flight attendants and retirees.

Contracts at those airlines are set to expire during the next two years.

At the three-day, first-ever, Flight Attendant Strategic Bargaining Summit in Washington D.C., Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA) President Patricia Friend told the group:

Working together as a whole is the key to advancing our profession. Regardless of who we are individually, our members are all flight attendants. We have seen how airline management groups borrow from each other during negotiations, and it is time to turn the table. By creating a single message on key issues, we have a better chance of tackling the corporate machine.

Working people have been concerned about the economy long before recent polls put the issue back into the spotlight. As AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker says:

Americans want to talk about the issues. Americans aren’t stupid, they know the economy is not working.

Speaking last week at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Holt Baker, recently elected as the AFL-CIO’s first African American officer, says the subprime mortgage crisis and the health care crisis are both symptoms of a broken economy.

The causes of this crisis and of the failing health of our entire economy are obvious: stagnant wages, disappearing pension benefits, and runaway health care costs. People who have decent incomes and benefits don’t have to resort to sub-prime loans in order to buy a home.

In South Dakota, Kim’s brother Kent hadn’t seen a doctor in years because he couldn’t afford health insurance and certainly couldn’t pay the doctor’s bill out of his own pocket. By the time his bladder cancer was diagnosed in 2003, it was too late. Kent died less than two years later.

Kim was one of the first people who responded to the AFL-CIO and Working America’s 2008 Health Care for America Survey that asks working families about their experiences with the nation’s health care system. We released the survey to a group of union and community activists yesterday—and it already has generated nearly 2,000 responses and more than 500 personal stories of how the nation’s health care system has failed workers and their families. (You can vote on stories you think make the most impact here.)