Is it hot in your inbox or are you just happy to see us? Today we’re bringing fire-emoji-worthy content from Esther Wang, who interviews Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson about the shifting tides in the labor movement, plus the joy of saying the word “strike.”

Then, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd talks to journalist Dahlia Lithwick about the recent SCOTUS vote on Alabama’s congressional map, and what that means for the future of the Voting Rights Act. I’ll give you a spoiler since we’re all friends here: it’s not good! But on the bright side, Lithwick also predicts a great new justice.

If you want to tell us how we’re doing, how you’re doing, or even what shows you’re watching, drop us a line at [email protected].

—Shannon Melero

ON LABOR

The Great Unionization

Why Flight Attendants Union President Sara Nelson is the labor leader we need

BY ESTHER WANG

THE GREAT SARA NELSON. (PHOTO BY TOM WILLIAMS VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Sara Nelson, the charismatic head of the nation’s largest flight attendants’ union, loves the word “strike.” During our 50-minute conversation recently, Nelson, who’s often described as America’s “most prominent labor leader,” used the term no less than a dozen times. It’s fitting, as it was her invocation of a general strike, uttered in January 2019 during a speech that subsequently went viral, that helped to end Donald Trump’s government shutdown. “Strike, strike, strike, strike, strike, strike, strike. Say it—it feels good,” she once proclaimed in the New York Times. A strike is a reminder of the ultimate power that workers possess—the power to withhold their labor and their time. In embracing it, Nelson is a bit of a throwback, and maybe also a figurehead that the U.S. labor movement needs in this particular moment.

Her industry needs her too. Flight attendants have been on the frontlines of the pandemic, and subject to shocking levels of abuse and at times physical violence from irate passengers. Last year saw a 500 percent increase in the number of violent incidents on airplanes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. In May 2021, to cite just one example, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant was punched by a woman after she asked her to put on her mask and follow other safety procedures. And airline executives have only made the lives of flight attendants more miserable, furloughing and laying off staff disproportionately, and pushing to reinstitute alcohol sales on planes.

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA began a union drive at Delta shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it picked up steam in December 2021 after the airline publicly pushed the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to reduce its recommended quarantine period for people with breakthrough infections—a move that Nelson described as “brazenly choosing the economy over workers’ lives.”

She and the AFA-CWA immediately went on a media blitz. “This wasn’t just about being critical of the CDC and Delta,” which had pressed the CDC for the change, Nelson said. “This was about being as loud as we could” to “spread the word to workers everywhere and get it into everyone’s consciousness—do not force people to come back to work.” As for Delta, the company eventually budged, amending its original policy in response to the union’s criticism. “They didn’t give us credit for that, but they changed their policy,” Nelson said, more than a hint of satisfaction in her voice.

NELSON AND MEMBERS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF FLIGHT ATTENDANTS FIGHTING FOR COVID RELIEF PACKAGES IN 2020. (PHOTO BY BILL CLARK VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Flight attendants aren’t alone in their demands for the safer workplaces and fairer pay that they—and all of us—deserve. Workers across industries are increasingly fed up, fueled by the indignity of being pandered to as “essential workers” even as they were being thrown to the wolves. During the pandemic, “what we saw was a consistent view of workers being disposable,” Nelson said. “And so now workers are like, listen, it’s not just that there’s all this inequality,” she said. “You don’t even give a damn about our lives. You don’t care if we live or die.” To Nelson, there is “a recognition that nothing is going to change if we don’t change it collectively.” This, she says, explains why support for unions is at its highest point in decades, and the flurry of unionization drives at Starbucks stores and Amazon warehouses. “Workers are saying, ‘Wow, the only way to take on someone who could be a trillionaire—and who leaves the rest of us with a burning Earth as he shoots off to Mars—is to organize in our workplace,’” Nelson said.

That’s the hope, at least. What has been dubbed the “Great Resignation”—a turn of phrase that neatly captures the mood of millions of Americans—is less a mass movement than a whole lot of individuals fed up and finding better jobs. But while workers may have a little more negotiating power now, that can change quickly. (Better pay and benefits, as anyone who has been sexually harassed on the job knows, are not the only markers of a decent workplace.) “The only way these gains are lasting is if we organize in the millions,” Nelson told me.

“And so now workers are like, listen, it’s not just that there’s all this inequality. You don’t even give a damn about our lives. You don’t care if we live or die.”

I asked Nelson what she would tell someone who wanted to bring that Norma Rae spirit to her own job—a working mom, for example—but was unsure where to begin. “Join unions, run unions. It’s that simple,” she said. If your workplace isn’t unionized? “Figure out how to organize one.” Easier said than done, but Nelson, who began her career as a flight attendant in 1996 before becoming the president of her union in 2014, is keenly aware of how unions can transform the lives of women. She recalled going to the White House in 2012 for a forum on women and the economy, where much of the discussion centered on closing the gender wage gap. At one point, she raised her hand to speak. “And I said, ‘You know, we’ve talked about the wage gap all morning. But why have we not talked about the one thing that would immediately close the wage gap and give women power in their workplace and give women power to actually collectively bargain, and bargain for their worth together? Why have we not talked about making it easier for women to join unions?’” According to Nelson, silence ensued. “And the moderator waited a minute, and then just called on someone else. And that was it.”

A lot has changed in the decade since. Fast-food workers are organizing for a union not just to raise their wages, but to combat pervasive sexual harassment. In June, Nelson may challenge current AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler for the federation’s top job. (“That’s something that feels like a real calling and a duty,” she told me when I asked, declining to give a definitive answer.)

And in the meantime, she says she loves the work. “I just have to share with you that my day started off right today, because the first thing that I got was a picture of Delta flight attendants over at the Starbucks in Atlanta, where they’re organizing,” Nelson told me, her voice cracking with emotion. The name one of the flight attendants gave the barista for her order? “Solidarity.”

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• So, you know how women were pushed out of the workforce by the millions because of, hmm what’s the reason, pre-existing systemic issues that were only exacerbated by the pandemic? Well, according to a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men’s workforce participation rate was up to 70% in January, while women are participating at 58%. This math isn’t mathing! With Build Back Better now Dead Dead Deader, child care still too pricey for many, and a virus that reinvents itself more frequently than Diddy–it’s clear more needs to be done.

• Major snaps this week to the state of Vermont, which is pushing an amendment to its state constitution which would safeguard the right to abortion and contraception—and make it the first state to protect abortion access at the constitutional level. Once the proposal is approved by Governor Phil Scott, Vermonters (Vermontonians? Fill us in, Burlington readers) will be able to vote on this historic measure.

  AND:

•  Students at Harvard have filed a lawsuit against the institution for how it dealt with sexual harassment complaints against anthropology professor John Comaroff, who was placed on administrative leave after an internal investigation found that he “violated policies on sexual and gender-based harassment and professional conduct.” Dismayingly, 38 esteemed Harvard professors—including many of our faves like Jamaica Kincaid and Jill Lepore—signed a letter defending the professor after he was reprimanded, even though the students’ accounts were alarming enough to merit investigation (the lawsuit accuses Harvard of obtaining one student’s therapy records without her knowledge, and then giving them to Comaroff). In response to the suit, many academics across the U.S. have signed a letter in support of the students, and now some professors want their names removed from the first letter.

• How long before the book banners snatch away the raciest, lewdest book ever written from the hands of young people who just want to read freely?

• Ebony magazine’s cover of André Leon Talley IS the moment.

• Pour some out for the iconic funk singer Betty Davis, who died Wednesday at the age of 77.

PACK THE COURTS IS THE NEW UNICORN

A Few Important SCOTUS Questions For Dahlia Lithwick

That Merrill ruling, your next justice, and more

BY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

SAY CHEESE, WE’RE DISMANTLING DEMOCRACY! (PHOTO BY ERIN SCHAFF VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Dahlia Lithwick is a brilliant lawyer and writer best known for her columns and podcast at Slate, which analyze the state of the law in the United States and Canada. She is an extreme genius, to me, in that she makes often-boring legalese legible, and that is a crucial skill right now, especially with a right-wing supermajority and a brewing war over who President Biden might choose to replace Justice Stephen Breyer. (For more on that, read Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on the double standard applied to the presumptive Black women nominees.)

On Monday, SCOTUS issued a stay in Merrill v. Milligan, a decision which seemed to greenlight racist gerrymandering of Congressional voting districts, in Alabama and beyond. I had questions for Lithwick; she made me 100% more informed if 85% more depressed.

JES: Does the Merrill order set the stage for the decimation of the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act countrywide? 

DL: In one sense it’s hard to know what the Merrill order does or does not do to what remains of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), because there is no actual order or reasoning offered. We quite literally have a stay—meaning that the District Court’s ruling [which would have put a stop to the gerrymandered maps] is halted, and a decision to hear the case…. someday. But there’s no new law.  

That is different from saying there are no legal consequences. The voters are stuck with the gerrymandered map. Now there’s a weird concurrence signed only by Justices Kavanaugh and Alito explaining, in a shadow docket order, why there is nothing wrong with shadow docket orders.

Then Kavanaugh really does make some new law by insisting it’s too close to the next election to draw new maps…But it’s not all that close to the election. Which at least seems to suggest that from now on, it will always be too close to the next election to challenge a map…and it will be impossible to bring VRA cases if there’s an election even a year away. 

The entirety of my Twitter timeline seems to think the solution to SCOTUS’s hyper-conservative majority, is to pack the courts—for Biden to expand SCOTUS from 9 to 13 justices. What do you think, and is packing the courts really that easy to do?

Um, yeah. Pack the Courts is the new Unicorn. If folks really wanted to press this issue the time to do it was a year ago, when Biden set up a commission to examine (but not make recommendations on) the issue. Nobody did. The commission finally issued a report that didn’t push court reform. For Biden’s purposes, the issue is resolved. It would require massive organizing and messaging and work to do structural court reform, and we can’t even reauthorize the VRA.

I agree that court reform is likely the only solution, but it almost ended FDR’s presidency and other than a handful of Senators and Congressmen who have started to push for it in earnest, I think we missed the moment. I say none of this with satisfaction. It’s just a huge, huge lift that needed to happen a year ago.

Who do you think is Biden’s most likely nominee to replace Justice Breyer?

My money is still on D.C. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson because she only just got confirmed last year and garnered three GOP votes. I think that is the easiest path to get something akin to bipartisan support in this Senate, and I think that will be appealing this close to the midterms. She’s a terrific nominee, as are most of the women on the various shortlists. It’s thrilling to see.

Listen to Lithwick’s podcast, Amicus, here. 

THE METEOR RECOMMENDS

Before you go, here’s a movie rec from Ayesha Johnson, director of operations at The Meteor. When she’s not busy directing all of the operations, she’s watching The Fallout on HBO Max. Take it away, Ayesha!

JENNA ORTEGA DELIVERS A HEARTWRENCHING PERFORMANCE IN THE FALLOUT. (PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER MEDIA/HBO MAX)

Opening with high schooler Vada Cavell (played by Jenna Ortega) brushing her teeth half-asleep and drooling with toothpaste as her younger sister busts through the bathroom door, The Fallout captivated me with its nuance, as it depicts a journey of loss and healing after a school shooting.

This is Megan Park’s screenwriting and directorial debut, and I think she’s especially good at exploring relationships—with yourself, among friends, between parent and child, and between sisters. Park’s thoughtfulness enriches each character. The music, composed by Billie Eilish’s go-to producer (and brother) FINNEAS, adapts with the film’s tone, so slight in its shifts that it’s reminiscent of Labrinth’s score for Euphoria’s first season. I won’t give away too much of what happens, but I’m sure you’re going to sit with this film, long after its end.

—Ayesha Johnson

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