The most powerful labor leader in the country right now is about 5’5” in sneakers, though her work uniform generally adds an extra inch or two. As the president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) and veteran flight attendant who has worked for United Airlines since 1996, Sara Nelson is no stranger to wearing heels—but after spending some time with her, one gets the distinct impression that she’d be just as comfortable in combat boots.

Nelson has fast become a rising star in the labor movement, as well as one of its most unapologetically militant voices. As the head of a union that represents nearly 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines, she reacted to the government shutdown in January with dire concern for both her membership and the passengers they are charged to protect, and—unlike many of her peers in union leadership—decided to do something drastic to fix it. It was her call for a general strike, delivered during her acceptance speech for the 2019 AFL-CIO MLK Drum Major for Justice Award on Sunday, January 20, that was widely credited for jump-starting the endgame of President Donald Trump’s brutal five-week shutdown. When I met with her not long after the shutdown had concluded, she explained that she was moved to action in part because she found the government’s refusal to take care of back pay for the federal workers to be simply “wrong, completely immoral.”

It’s been a good while since American labor leaders—known mostly these days for resisting confrontational strike tactics and seeking to influence electoral outcomes via campaign donations—have resorted to such “which side are you on” appeals. But for Nelson, they’re her rhetorical stock in trade. During the shutdown crisis, she warned that the aviation industry had only a few more days before it began to truly collapse, and would soon face a massive wave of flight cancellations. Millions of air passengers would be put at risk thanks to the industry’s reliance on a grossly understaffed, unpaid federal security workforce, she prophesied. She went on to paint a dystopian picture of abandoned airline infrastructure not unlike what readers had encountered in the blockbuster line of Left Behind novels by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye: security checkpoints closed, safety inspectors absent, federal cybersecurity staff on furlough, and airport security personnel forced to work without pay. “As I have said many times in recent days, safety and security is non-negotiable,” she said at the AFL-CIO event. “The TSA was created for the same reason my friends’ names, along with 3000 others, are engraved in bronze at the 9/11 memorial in New York. If they can’t do their job, I can’t do mine. Dr. King said, ‘Their destiny is tied up with our destiny. We cannot walk alone.’ ”





Nelson was the first labor leader to dare utter the phrase “general strike” publicly—and to urge other AFL-CIO leaders to talk to their memberships about taking mass action. “Go back with the fierce urgency of now to talk with your locals and international unions about all workers joining together,” the call rang out from the blonde woman commanding the podium, “to end this shutdown with a general strike!”

Nelson was the first labor leader to dare utter the phrase “general strike” publicly—and to urge other AFL-CIO leaders to talk to their memberships about taking mass action.

That speech had an almost immediate real-world effect, as the substance of Nelson’s warning began to unfold in real time. Two days after her January 20 call to action, workers at several major Northeastern airports began calling in sick, causing major flight delays at Newark, Philadelphia, and New York City’s LaGuardia, as well as in Jacksonville, Florida, and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta. Individuals had been doing this sporadically since as early as January 4, but once Nelson’s words rang out, the trickle became a flood. According to TSA national statistics, on January 21, the day after her speech, the unscheduled absence rate in the agency’s workforce was 7.5 percent, more than double what it had been on the same date a year previously. By January 21, 10 percent of TSA workers were calling in sick. On Wednesday January 23, the AFA-CWA, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, and the Air Line Pilots Association International issued a joint letter stressing the urgent safety concerns associated with the ongoing shutdown, condemning the circumstances that forced their members to work without pay, and calling on Congress to take action immediately.