Exploring Pink collar unionization
A 1974 newspaper headline addressing the increase in women's unions (SWFR)
"The union revolt swept aside decades-old structures of subordination in just a few years."
-Kathleen M. Barry, author of Femininity in Flight
To be recognized as safety professionals and fight back against their objectification, flight attendants created one of the first successful female-run unions, the Association of Flight Attendants.
"...the women negotiating the 1974 agreement for United Airlines flight attendants began the process of breaking the traditions of social, political, and economical discriminations against women." - Georgia P. Nielsen |
45-day strike with over 300 TWA stewardesses in the strike line in 1973 (Cade, 1974)
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This graph shows the growing number of women becoming associated with workforce unions.
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"Unlike most women in the female service ghetto, the majority of flight attendants had joined unions in the 1940s and 1950s. ...These unions had secured moderate advances in wages, hours, and working conditions for flight attendants, and under growing pressure from the flight attendants themselves and the impetus of new anti-discriminatory legislation, they had helped undermine the airline policies restricting the occupation to white, young, single, and childless women. ...But by the early 1970s, flight attendants wanted more: They wanted economic rights and opportunities equal to men as well as the right to control and define their own sexuality and 'personhood '. To secure these rights, flight attendants put increasing pressure on their male-dominated unions and formed the first all-female national organization of flight attendants, Stewardesses For Women's Rights (SFWR)." |
Power in numbers
Prior to forming their own union, stewardesses were part of a male pilot-dominated union, the Air Line Pilots Association. However, after the stewardesses established the Association of Flight Attendants in 1974, they used their power in numbers to obtain equal rights for stewardesses and women as a whole.
"With the advent of “jumbo” jets, the workforce had increased from around 30,000 to more than 40,000 just between 1970 and 1974. As their numbers and militancy grew, flight attendants found little reason to continue subordinating their desire for union self-governance to secure the protection and resources of parent unions." |
Famed feminist and social and political activist, Gloria Steinem, leading the New York City march of the Women's Strike for Equality after addressing the first national conference of Stewardesses for Women's Rights (Libela, 2013)
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"The stewardess unions actually began their campaign before the second wave, at a time when few people had any interest in women's rights. When the women's movement caught up with them, union leaders used its impetus, and as they did, they quickly came to identify themselves as feminists fighting sex discrimination, not just as unionists confronting management." |
encounters with the law
Flight attendants went to court and Congress to fight the requirements they were subjected to, including age and marital restrictions. In addition, they exchanged the concept of feminism in the workforce with those they encountered.
"Every flight attendant I knew hated the regulations. My union challenged TWA in court and eventually got them all nullified. Moreover, thanks to our union, wages went up and women could become Pursers and Service Managers."
-Sara Nichols, former TWA Stewardess
"Stewardesses were ... the very first working women to file charges of sex discrimination with the Commission, specifically targeting airline age ceilings and marriage bans. In so doing, they joined other aggrieved women in ensuring that the [Equal Opportunity Employment Commission] would pay attention to sex bias as well as racial discrimination..." |
Stewardesses at Capitol Hill to protest retirement at age thirty-two. (Bettman/Corbis, 1965)
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"Whatever their organizational status, the more than 37,000 unionized flight attendants in the United States were more combative and demanding than ever before. ...When United Airlines sat down to bargain with AFA for the first time in 1974, the flight attendants presented the longest, most expensive list of initial contract demands that the carrier had seen from any union." |