OPINION: All Alaskans have a stake in flight attendants’ contract

Alaska Airlines flight attendants are bargaining for a new contract, and every single one of us who relies on reliable air service has a stake in their success. While Wall Street special interests and foreign shareholders will push Alaska Airlines to drive down wages and benefits, those of us who need safe, reliable air service are counting on flight attendants to have good pay and benefits, just as we do for pilots and other staff.

Alaska Airlines is an anomaly: It’s an airline that flies mostly on time with good customer service. In large part, that’s because Alaska’s strong unions have negotiated good contracts for pilots, flight attendants and other staff over many contract cycles. A strong workforce means safer and more reliable service, fewer workforce shortages, and far better customer service. Wall Street wants to hollow out Alaska Airlines, but it’s a matter of the public interest to keep Alaska’s great workforce, from pilots to flight attendants to maintenance staff.

Contrast Alaska Airlines’ great record of reliability and customer service with many other national airlines, whose abysmal performance would be dark comedy if it wasn’t so inconvenient and costly for consumers. For example, my parents live in a city for which United Airlines has a near-monopoly. United has canceled half of all the flights they’ve ever tried to take to Alaska, and those cancellations invariably come at the last minute. Terrible customer service isn’t just inconvenient — it represents theft from consumers who then have to rebook tickets later, racking up charges for hotels and food when they’re stranded away from home. Thank goodness Alaska Air isn’t like this, but Wall Street special interests want to drive up short-term shareholder returns by decimating Alaska’s workforce, from pilots to flight attendants.

Over the past 40 years, the “financialization” of our economy has empowered Wall Street hedge funds and corporate raiders at the expense of local business executives and workers who actually know how what kind of labor it takes to make companies work. The same Wall Street venality that threatens Alaska Airlines today has significantly damaged Boeing, undermining deep local knowledge of machinists and engineers with a dangerous attempt to cut short-term costs at the expense of long term safety and quality. The appalling and avoidable crashes of MAX planes were just the most visible manifestation of Wall Street’s slash-and-burn corporate management.

In many ways, the flight attendants’ fight for a fair contract is a microcosm of our broader economic policy choices: Will we build an economy that works for the middle class, or will we allow a few elites on Wall Street to capture corporate profits while driving down wages for working families? Will we strive for rapid and broadly shared economic growth, or will we settle for the kind of slow growth that invariably results from taking away middle class wage gains? America’s strongest, most sustained period of economic growth occurred for the 25 years after World War II, when we had strong unions, stronger regulation of Wall Street, and a corporate culture that prioritized good jobs in local communities rather than the slash-and-burn raiding that became common in the 1980s. Allowing Wall Street to get a larger and larger share of our national wealth isn’t just unfair, it reduces our opportunity for growth and weakens us economically relative to hostile dictatorships like China and Russia. We need to aim for strong, sustained growth, and that requires a strong middle class, from flight attendants to teachers to machinists and beyond.

Alaska Air has a long record of far more conscientious leadership than most other big corporations in general and airlines in particular. The enemy we confront isn’t Alaska Airlines leadership — the enemy is outsider special interests that want to drive up shareholder returns at the expense of reliability and safety. These Wall Street and foreign executives don’t rely on normal air service — like the CEO of United Airlines, they get around by private jet. The rest of need reliable air service, and that means we all have a stake in Alaska Airlines flight attendants winning a strong contract to protect Alaska Airlines’ great workforce and strengthen America’s middle class.

Zack Fields represents downtown Anchorage and surrounding neighborhoods in the Alaska House of Representatives.

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