Delta Flight Attendants Working Together for a Union

An energetic, grassroots campaign is underway to organize flight attendants at Delta Airlines and while AFA-CWA is overseeing the effort, the real inspiration is coming from the workers themselves.

"It's phenomenal, almost shocking what they've managed to build in the last four to five months," said Danny Campbell, a Northwest Airlines flight attendant who is coordinating the effort.

Already, 850 flight attendants have signed on as "activists" and another 500 have expressed interest. All activists are encouraged to work at their comfort level — if they can run a phone tree, great, if they'd rather just carry sign-up cards and other materials with them to share with crew members, that's great, too.

Campbell said it's a kind of "freelance activism" that is especially suited to organizing a national unit of roughly 12,000 flight attendants who live in literally every state and are based at airports across the country.

AFA-CWA International Vice President Veda Shook said the focus has been on getting a structure set up first, rather than concentrating too soon on getting authorization cards for a Railway Labor Act election circulated and collected.

"It's an organic approach: Let's build the union, and then the election will come," Shook said, noting that with the structure now solidly in place, hundreds of cards have been signed in the past month.

In meetings with Delta activists who worked on an unsuccessful 2001 campaign, Campbell learned that too much outside help was part of the problem then.

"The sentiment seemed to be that the last campaign was an external campaign, with decisions about strategy and tactics being made from the outside," he said. "What we've tried to do is create the epitome of a mobilization model, where everything in this campaign is really being run at the grassroots level."

Like AFA-CWA did when it organized at Northwest in 2006, union leaders will hold a forum via webcast Sept. 13 to answer Delta flight attendants' questions. The following week in Chicago, the union will hold a training workshop for members at other airlines who want to help with the organizing campaign.

Delta, meanwhile, has never really stopped the anti-union campaign it began in earnest when AFA last tried to organize. Although Shook said it's a slicker, more subtle attempt at union-bashing than some companies engage in, it had been effective. But in the years since the union's defeat, Delta workers have been through the company's bankruptcy, downsizing, airport base closures, pay cuts and work rule changes.

"Delta management used to tout itself as the industry leader for pay and benefits," Shook said. "Now they're merely striving to meet the industry standard. Without a doubt, Delta flight attendants are working more days and hours for less pay."