This story is part of a special series celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Fast Company Innovation Festival.
Ten years ago, when Sara Nelson was elected president of the Association of Flight Attendants—the union that represents airline workers at United, Frontier, Alaska, and other airlines—the picture for the U.S. labor movement was grim. “We were clearly failing the working class,” says Nelson. Stories of striking autoworkers and organizing Starbucks baristas were not yet dominating national news.
“We were still in a place where the narrative was that the labor movement was outmoded, that it was something for the past,” she says. “We couldn’t yet awaken people to their power of withholding their labor.”
But through her work—both as the leader of her own union and as a vital, powerful communicator on television, at rallies, and on Capitol Hill—Nelson has been at the vanguard of a new moment of solidarity among workers (“an injury to one is injury to all, across race and industry,” she says). She’s rallied these workers around a clear narrative, “which is that there’s the corporate elite, and then there’s the working class.”
Nelson ascended into the national spotlight when she used the threat of a flight attendants’ strike, which would ground air travel, to help end a protracted government shutdown in 2019. She was instrumental in negotiating aspects of the CARES Act that helped bail out the airlines during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing some of the most worker-friendly policies in any industry. Her union recently won a tentative contract with Alaska Airlines that includes an average 32% raise for flight attendants, is taking a strike authorization vote at United over wage issues, and is leading a major push to win a unionization vote among Delta flight attendants, the last remaining major airline in the U.S. without a union.
Throughout these efforts, Nelson has been ready—eager, even—to stand up to the CEOs and call out what her members see as corporate greed. Her tough language inspires workers, yet it also, paradoxically, has helped earn her the respect of the executives she’s negotiating against. This has cemented her position as an influential policy voice in Congress and the White House (she was reportedly on a short list to become Biden’s labor secretary in early 2023).
Today, Nelson travels the country and makes regular TV appearances in support of everyone from striking miners to Amazon employees who are organizing, and she is working closely with a new generation of labor leaders—among them United Auto Workers’ Shawn Fain, who led a 2023 strike that won autoworkers a landmark contract. In his bold pronouncements against the “billionaire class,” it was easy to hear an echo of Nelson’s rhetoric.
While the overall numbers of U.S. workers who are in a union remain small, the labor movement has recovered a fighting spirit: 2023 saw the most work stoppages in a year since 2000. Instead of collaborating with companies to preserve so-called labor peace and seeking change within the political system, unions, thanks to Nelson’s influence, are wielding the power of the strike in a way that hasn’t been seen since the zenith of labor’s power in the mid-20th century. “Politics are not going to come to the working class,” Nelson says. “The working class has to set the agenda, and politics will come to us.”