New book on ascent of flight attendants union

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From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant: Women and the Making of a Union, by Georgia Panter Nielsen. ILR Press, 1982, 160 pp.

The years 1945 and 1946 witnessed the largest labor upsurge in American history. More than 8 million workers engaged in almost 10,000 recorded work stoppages during those two years. Soldiers returning home from the war found that they faced the same situation they had left-unemployment and poverty. Employers, on the other hand, had grown fat from war profiteering.

This was also a time when the commercial airline industry was coming into its own. And with it came efforts to organize the workers in this booming industry. Georgia Nielsen's book From Skygirl to Flight Attendant tells the story of how flight attendants organized their union during the renewed labor activity following the war. She traces the history of the Association of Flight Attendants (and its predecessors) up through the 1980s.

The occupa ion of flight attendant only came into existence in 1930. One has to remember that in-flight service, such as it was, was initially considered the job of a man, usually the copilot.

There was a great deal of opposition, in fact, to hiring women. Nielsen tells us that it was Ellen Church, who originally aspired to be a copilot, who initiated the idea of "sky girls" at Boeing Air Transport, one of four predecessors of United Airlines.

Many obstacles for women Ada J. Brown, a United Airlines stewardess, is credited with organizing the first union for stewardesses in 1945. The obstacles to organizing were, of course, great. The women worked long hours for little pay and the no-marriage rule guaranteed a high turnover in personnel.

The prevailing social view of women at the time was that their primary role in life was as a wife and mother. A job as a flight attendant was often looked at as simply an exciting and glamorous interlude Advertisement photo

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before settling to their calling home.

Despite the difficulties, Brown's organizing efforts paid off, and the Air Line Stewardesses Association (ALSA) was established on Aug. 22, 1945.

Nielsen claims there was no antiunion campaign by management at United Airlines. She credits United's President William A. Patterson with being a benevolent man truly interested in the welfare of the workers. She goes so far as to refer to a source who said that a antiunion campaign would have "greatly offended" Patterson.

This is misleading. Mr. Patterson would have on being Valentin's • BOOK REVIEW been much more offended by the loss of profits a prolonged strike would have caused. No doubt, too, the widespread labor unrest after the war had something to do with his decision to recognize the union. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the union was organized on the back of the great organizing efforts of the 1930s, when millions of workers joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

For flight attendants the union has come to mean more than providing economic protection. Flight attendants have faced discrimination on the basis of sex, age, race, appearance, weight, and marital status. The women's liberation movement, however, has had a profound impact in giving women flight attendants confidence to fight against demeaning treatment and be treated as the professionals they are.

That has meant fighting for the right to marry and keep their job. It has meant fighting for the right to grow old and keep one's job. And as a side benefit, the women's movement has helped open up flight attendant jobs to men.

What is "women's work?"

The changing attitudes about who is qualified to be a flight attendant provide some interesting insights into the superficiality of sexual stereotypes. At first the idea of women working on aircraft was considered shocking. Could women do the work? Was it possible?

But years later, after women as flight attendants became the norm, a Mr. Diaz applied for a job as a flight attendant for Pan Am and was turned down because he was male. In the ensuing court case, Pan Am brought in "expert" psychiatric testimony where it was explained that male flight attendants would pose a threat to the masculinity of male passengers. The court ruled against Diaz, pointing out also that at 30 years of age he was too old. But the case was appealed and the ruling overturned.

Nielsen's history of the flight attendants' union, and especially its sometimes difficult relations in the past with the pilots' union, reminds us not only of the difficulties that the union has had to contend with in organizing a predominantly female union. It reminds us also how much things have changed as we today witness a new sense of union solidarity taking root among all airline employees.

MOYIF REV W star in Hector Babenco's "Kiss of the request that he convey information to the underground. Like the cabaret singer in the Nazi film-and characters in a thousand melodramas-he has been redeemed by love. But this is a redemption that has the ring of truth.

Valentin, badly battered by his jailers, is given a shot of morphine by a prison doctor. He drifts off into a morphine dream—or perhaps it is the last gleam of consciousness before death— in which his lover opens the prison doors.

They escape together to the exotic island locale of the spiderwoman of whom Molina had told him in one of his fantastic narratives. This is the only kind of escape from the struggle he can have.

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