The Assault on Labor: The 1986 TWA Strike and the Decline of Workers' Rights in America by Sandra L. Albrecht (review)

Recent decisions from the US Supreme Court are a stark reminder of the hostile climate that American unions face in the twenty-first century. In May 2018 the court ruled that employers could force workers to sign "class action waivers" that would prevent them from using collective lawsuits to address employment issues. The following month in the infamous Janus decision the court overturned an earlier ruling that required non-members of public sector unions to pay "fair share" fees to cover things like grievances and health and safety. Labor advocates rightly point out that such decisions pose a serious threat to workers and unions in America, hindering employees' efforts to obtain justice and undermining unions' ability to function (Ariane de Vogue and Clare Foran, "Supreme Court Deals Major Blow to Public Sector Unions," CNNPolitics, www.cnn.com/2018/06/27/politics/supreme-court-union-fees-decision/index.html [accessed September 8, 2018]).

The Supreme Court's attacks on working people and their organizations are part of the long history of class conflict in the United States and the latest development in an intensified assault on labor that began in the late 1970s when employers and the state stepped up their efforts to roll back the rights and victories won by the labor movement over the course of the twentieth century. In The Assault on Labor: The 1986 TWA Strike and the Decline of Workers' Rights in America, sociologist Sandra L. Albrecht provides a detailed study of this assault through an analysis of a key labor battle that occurred during this period: the 1986 strike by sixty-five hundred unionized flight attendants employed by Trans World Airlines (TWA). The ten-week strike began on March 7 and ended on May 17 when the union representing the flight attendants—the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants (IFFA)—made an unconditional offer to return to work. Though the strikers displayed incredible solidarity and pursued a number of creative tactics to pressure the airline to negotiate a fair contract and rehire the thousands of flight attendants who had been permanently replaced during the strike, the strain of a long and tense strike, the hiring of replacement workers, and several unfavorable rulings from the courts ultimately shaped the outcome in favor of the employer. Albrecht's in-depth analysis of this significant strike waged by a female-dominated union in an industry undergoing rapid transformation is a fascinating study that highlights the limitations of the labor relations system and the importance of worker militancy and solidarity.

The Assault on Labor examines the TWA strike as an example of how major shifts in US labor relations during the 1970s and 1980s shaped the outcome of labor disputes and made it increasingly difficult for workers and unions to secure improvements in wages and working conditions through collective bargaining and strikes. Albrecht's central argument is that the TWA strike was "one of the most dramatic cases of the heightened labor conflict of the 1970s," in which management increasingly used permanent replacements to break strikes and scare workers and unions into accepting major concessions (2). At the same time, such tactics also spurred labor into action. During this period, she contends, workers engaged in "a solidarity that went beyond the strike and reenergized rank and file unionism" (9). In the case of the TWA flight attendants, "they remained in solidarity with one another, maintained their focus on their goal of returning everyone to the line, and developed strategies of survival that gained them the reputation of the 'pit bulls' of the labor movement" (2).

Albrecht's study consists of eight chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, she provides an overview of the book, the history of flight attendant unionization at TWA, and the shifts that occurred in labor relations and the airline industry in the 1970s...