Donald Trump will once again be inaugurated as president in just a week’s time, and the lessons of workers’ victories from his past administration provides an important roadmap to the fight ahead. In 2019, flight attendants organized to end a government shutdown that threw airports around the country into chaos. Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, joins The Real News for a look back at the 2019 shutdown fight and how unions can give workers the tools they need to fight back over the next four years. Studio Production: David Hebden Post-Production: Cameron Granadino Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: On January 20th, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States of America. As I sit with you here now, I can feel the pull of what’s coming. It’s like we’re fast approaching a waterfall. We really don’t know what’s on the other side, but big changes are coming one way or another. We don’t know how the next four or eight or even 50 years will play out because that story has yet to be written. What happens next depends on what we all do now. But if we want to be the authors and protagonists of that story, not just names and stories written by some sociopathic, billionaire oligarchs or religious fanatics, not just numbers on a corporate spreadsheet or in a passing news report, then we got to be very clear about what we’re fighting for, what side we’re fighting on, and we got to learn from the past about how to fight effectively and win. And today on The Real News, we are talking with someone who knows a little something about fighting and winning. Sarah Nelson is one of the most prominent and widely known labor leaders in the United States and around the world, a United Airlines flight attendant since 1996. Sarah has served as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants CWA AFL-CIO, a union representing over 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines since 2014. But it was exactly six years ago that Sarah Nelson became a household name. If you all recall, six years ago in January of 2019, the US was in the midst of the longest government shutdown in our history, a shutdown that lasted 35 days. It was the second government shutdown that took place during Donald Trump’s first term, and the shutdown centered on Trump’s demand that Congress approve $5.7 billion in federal funds to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. The shutdown resulted in around 380,000 federal workers being furloughed with an additional 420,000 federal employees forced to work without pay until the end of the shutdown. While working people suffered and Democrats and Republicans in DC played their game of high stakes political brinkmanship, Sarah Nelson stepped into the national spotlight and called on the labor movement to intervene. Sara Nelson: We are here today because we are concerned about our safety, our security, and our economic stability, our jobs. For years, the right has vilified federal workers as nameless, faceless bureaucrats. But the truth is they’re air traffic controllers, they’re food inspectors, they’re transportation security officers and law enforcement. They’re the people who live and work in our communities and they are being hurt. This is about our safety and security and our jobs and our entire country’s economic stability. No one will get out of this unscathed if we do not stop this shutdown. Leader McConnell, you can fix this today. If you don’t show the leadership to bring your caucus to a vote to open the government today, then we are calling on the conscientious members of your caucus to do it for you. There is no excuse to continue this. This is not a political game. Open the government today. We are calling on the public on February 16th if we are in a day 36 of this shutdown for everyone to come to the airports, everyone come to the airports and demand that this Congress work for us and get politics out of our safety and security. Maximillian Alvarez: In a speech she delivered while receiving the MLK Drum Major for Justice Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFL-CIO on January 20th of 2019, Nelson went even further and called for a general strike to end the shutdown and to support the 800,000 federal employees who were locked out or forced to work without pay. She said, “Almost a million workers are locked out or being forced to work without pay. Others are going to work when our workspace is increasingly unsafe. What is the labor movement waiting for? Go back with the fierce urgency of now to talk with your locals and international unions about all workers joining together to end this shutdown with a general strike.” Nelson’s fiery calls to action hit the political world like a lightning bolt. And after a month of political gridlock with the threat of a general strike now on the table, Trump and the GOP caved and ended the shutdown on January 25th. What can we learn from this pivotal and historic struggle from Trump’s first term in office? What can it teach us about the struggles that we will face with a second Trump term and a fully megafied Republican Party effectively controlling all branches of government and what lies in store for workers in the labor movement itself as we careen into our uncertain future? To talk about all of this, I’m honored to be joined today by the one and only Sara Nelson herself. Sara, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News, I really appreciate it. Sara Nelson: Happy to be with you every time, Max. Maximillian Alvarez: Right back at you, sis. And we need your voice now more than ever, and I really appreciate you making time for this with everything you’ve got going on, which we’re going to talk about at the end of this interview. But right now, as those clips that we played in the introduction show, yours was a powerful and essential voice rising from the labor movement at a critical moment during the Trump and GOP-led government shutdown back in 2019. It was, as I said, the longest government shutdown in US history, and this struggle really showed why we need labor movement militancy, and it showed what workers can do to flex our power to change the partisan and political terrain. So I wanted to ask if you could take us back to that moment during the 2019 shutdown. Let’s remind our viewers and listeners what was actually happening, what was at stake and what was going on in your world, in your heart as all of this was unfolding and why you stood up the way that you did. Sara Nelson: Well, Max, every government shutdown is a threat to flight attendants and anyone in the aviation industry, we’re very, very aware of that because you have people like transportation security officers and air traffic controllers coming to work without a paycheck, which is incredibly stressful. The first thing you learn in safety is remove all distractions. What could be more distracting than not getting a paycheck for going to work? And so as we saw this coming on, we started to define the problem right away. And what we saw in 2018, because this started just before Christmas in 2018, and you would think that people would have a little bit of empathy, but what Donald Trump had done is that, oh, they’re not missing a paycheck yet. This is no big deal. They’re going to get paid and back pay. And so there was already a division. What we had to do was define the problem, and I want to be really clear about this. This is a really important thing. Define the problem. Set your demands, back up your demands with what you’re willing to do to get them and add urgency. And so the very first thing that we did was we worked very, very closely with the other aviation unions and even the rest of the industry. Very early in January, I happened to be at an aviation conference with everyone in the room and from manufacturers to airlines, to suppliers to general aviation. I mean, people were worried about this who were flying private jets, right? And aviation unions, we got together and defined all of the issues about why this was a problem to have this shutdown. There were not safety specter inspectors in place. There were not safety inspectors to sign off on new aircraft for delivery. There was not safety inspectors in place to sign off on pilot licenses where they’re getting their renewed certifications so they could go back on the job. The issues and the ramifications around this are endless. The other thing that happens is all the work on any modernizing or fixing problems, that all gets put to the side. So as the government shutdown goes on, the safety net stretches to the point where there are holes, and that became more and more dangerous as that shutdown went on. So we defined that problem. On January 10th, we actually published a letter that had never been published before by the entire industry. Everyone had signed this. These are people who usually fight with each other every single day on Capitol Hill and in the workplace, but we were united around that and nobody remembers that part of the story, but we put that out there. We started having press conferences. AFGE, they were telling the stories of the workers. These were not just nameless, faceless bureaucrats, like I said in that speech, these were real people that people could see were sleeping in their cars at the airport, not because they didn’t have a home to go home to, but they didn’t even have money to put gas in their car. And so they were so dedicated to their jobs and the fact that they were forced to come to work because as we knew from Patco, they’d just be fired or possibly sent to jail if they didn’t. And so they were sleeping in their cars because they didn’t have any more gas in their cars to go home and come back and still going back to work in the morning. These are the kind of stories we were able to tell. And AFGE actually got a hold of a memo that went down through some of the agencies from the administration saying, you are not to say that you were struggling during this shutdown, you are not to share your stories. You’re supposed to tell everyone. You’re just fine. And it’s only because the union was in the workplace that we were able to give workers cover and say, that is baloney. We’re telling the truth. We’re telling the American public what this means to them. And that is a really important part of this story because that needs to happen in every contract fight that needs to happen in every legislative battle, whether it’s local or federal. We need to be ready to define the issues. And we can do that because nobody knows this work and what it means to our communities and to everyone around us better than working people do. So we got to take that in. But I kept saying to people, what can we do? What is going to get their attention? And you talked about it. He wanted the money for the southern border wall, and that was what was holding up the package deal. Well, I got to tell you, that was bullshit. Okay? That was racist fear-mongering to try to divide the country further, have people focused on this issue over here when what was really happening was this was Trump trying to get what the GOP had been trying to get for 50 years. And that is privatize every function of government because if there had been an aircraft accident, if there had been a terrorist attack, there would’ve been incredible weight that had been added to the administrative office of the president and the executive office, and the president would’ve been able to say, I’ll fix it and privatize everything. It’s not working. So we’ll do that. And if nothing happened, of course, it would give more to the narrative of, oh, this is just a bureaucratic mess in government, so we don’t need it so we can shut it down. So let’s be very clear, Project 2025 was at the heart of that government shutdown. That was already the plan that they were trying to put in place. We see it in black and white now that they’re trying to dismantle these functions of government because what does that do? That makes the most vulnerable, even more vulnerable, which makes people desperate, which makes people agree to things they would never agree to otherwise, just to get fresh air, just to be able to try to feed their families. And so we cannot have a labor movement that is in a desperate place. We have to be defining the problem and setting our demands. That’s what we did there. And I’ll tell you what, on January 24th, the Senate and the House took a vote that did not pass. The same thing that passed the very next day. And it wasn’t until we had said, we’re ready to strike. We’re calling on everyone else to strike. And a few flights started to cancel LaGuardia because 10 air traffic controllers signed in for their job and said, “I physically can’t go on. I cannot do my job.” People talk about it calling in sick. No, these are people who have such a stressful job that when they come to work, they leave their phones outside, they go into dark rooms, they have to retire at age 56, and they have to sign a note every single day that says I’m fit for duty. And they couldn’t continue to sign that they were driving Ubers at night to try to take care of their families. They missed another paycheck just the day before. And so when these flights started to cancel, we said, “Leader McConnell, can you hear us now?” And all of a sudden when there was no political solution about a southern border wall, supposedly there was a solution within a couple of hours because the GOP recognized that workers were going to get a taste of our power, and that was the thing they were more scared of than anything. So they ended that government shutdown before people could truly take in that when we take action together, we take control of the agenda and we can set forward the policies that matter for working people. Maximillian Alvarez: Oh, yeah. I really want to underline in red pen again in case anyone is forgetting what happened. It was union workers who ended that shutdown. It was workers who applied the pressure that got the people in DC to actually do what they were supposed to do. And I want to hover on that for a quick second, Sara, because I think, like you said, every government shutdown is a threat to our safety. People don’t think about all the ramifications, but during a 35-day shutdown, you start to see what the effects are. But in every- Sara Nelson: Yeah, seniors are going to get kicked out of their housing because that program was down. HUD was down. But workers everywhere were talking about this. And what I also saw there was I was talking about this in interviews as I was going from one part of DC back to our office and the cab driver, when I handed him money, I’ll never forget this. I handed him the money and he grabbed my hand through the little window of the cab and he had a tear rolling down his cheek and he said, “Thank you. You’re fighting for me too.” Because no one was coming to work. There were no cab fares to be had. This is all related. We’re all in this together. And what I noted in that moment, especially as this all started, was that we had been suffering for 40 years of an attack on the strike and attack on unions, an attack on working people while the rich got richer, our wages stayed flat, productivity went through the roof. And that was because Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981, sent many of them to jail and told the rest of the country, all of corporate America, that it was open season on unions. And the labor movement did not respond the way that we should have been. We should have understood that even though Patco endorsed President Reagan and people were pissed about it, even though they had demands that were demands that were better than the rest of ours, they were fighting for a 32-hour work week. And people were like, “Oh, they’re greedy.” And all this stuff. There was all this messaging. The fact that we let that happen, the rest of us have been suffering ever since because of the attack on that strike, because the attack on working people. And so this moment in the government shutdown was also about righting that wrong and resetting the course for working people to understand that an injury to one is an injury to all, and it is a ripple effect. And if you don’t get out there and stand up with the most vulnerable people, they’re coming for you next. And that’s what we saw. We’ve seen it. We need to know that we learned that, and hopefully we’re not going to ever allow that to happen again. Maximillian Alvarez: On that note, that’s also what makes 2019 such a pivotal moment, both in terms of the Democrat, republican, bipartisan political side of things, and as you mentioned, the labor movement politics within unions 40 years after Patco, right? Or nearly 40 years after the Patco strike. You were really kind of stepping into a moment where these two things were converging. And I just wanted to ask a little more about that. Because in every government shutdown, it’s basically a waiting game opinion to see which party gets blamed for the shutdown and caves to the public pressure and gives into the demands of the other side. And that’s kind of what we were watching unfold six years ago. But then people’s imaginations changed because a new player entered the chat. You and the movement and workers and unions showed that it’s not just Democrats and Republicans who have a say in what happens here. And so I wanted to ask what that moment meant for the breaking of people’s political imagination and why that’s such an important lesson for us to take to heart now. But also if you could speak a little more on what state the labor movement was in at that point and what willingness the organized labor movement writ large was willing to play and why this was such a step forward calling for a general strike, like urging more militancy like you did six years ago. Sara Nelson: Well, I want to be really clear that that was on the backs of the Chicago teachers in 2012 being willing to say under Karen Lewis’s leadership, the word strike again, being willing to organize in a way that brings the entire community to the fight and helps the community understand what that fight was about. And that strike inspired then West Virginia teachers to go out on an illegal strike. They didn’t even have collective bargaining rights, but they defined the problem so well that not a single county executive was willing to go to court to sue them over illegally going on strike. And they brought everyone to the fight by defining that problem and having everyone understand it was everyone’s problem. And they went out and they built so much power that they not only got a contract for themselves with those races, they got raises for all the other public employees in West Virginia. And that set up a spark that lit all over the country with the red for ed strikes. And I think it’s really important actually to recognize that because working people are not red or blue working. People live everywhere. And if we confine ourselves to, oh, we can only force the people that we think might have a conscience, and the people who have traditionally said they’re with working people with the applause lines like, “Labor gave us the weekend, labor gave us the eight-hour day.” Hello? Look the fuck around. Nobody has a weekend anymore. Nobody has an eight-hour day. Stop it. What we need to be talking about is collective bargaining. We need to be talking about worker power. We need to be talking about taking care of people. And so going into that shutdown, we already had grocery who had taken on a huge strike. Teachers all over the country, there had already started to be an awakening in the labor movement to labor power. So we took that moment and ran with it. This wasn’t like a game. I lost my friends on 9/11 and I was in our office one day during this fight, and it’s all we were doing. We were updating dating our leaders every sing day, I was talking to the other labor union leaders every single day, talking to the president of the Air Traffic single day. And we kept people informed, we did town halls for our members, but some people have to let off a little steam and have a little fun. And my communications team, I heard them laughing down the hall. And I got to tell you, I’m almost embarrassed to tell this story, but I went shooting down the hall and I said, “What’s so funny? There’s nothing that’s funny. Somebody’s going to die and it’s going to be on our watch, and I’m not going to stand for it. We can’t stand for it.” And so we knew that this was as mu on us as it was on those federal workers, and we had to take Stan going into this moment with Trump. There was already this labor militancy was moving and people were about labor’s power that was starting to take effect. But we also had to recognize that it’s not the politics. We have this big argument in how much do labor unions spend on politics every year and how much do they spend on organizing? Where would we be better served? Democracy doesn’t just sort of exist in this great land of like, oh, if everybody shows up and votes, it’s all going to be okay. They are controlling our politics with their money. Every single corporate entity has lobbyists on the hill talking to these people every single day. And I’ll tell you what, Democrats and Republicans are subject to pressure from their constituents if their constituents understand what the fuck they’re doing. So we have to not think about this as red and blue or purple whatever it is. We have to think about it from the point of worker power, defining that problem, setting our demands and making sure that we’re holding every single representative accountable. They answer to us. We don’t wait to hear from them what the plan is, they answer to us. And so that is a really important point going into this administration. We cannot assume that Trump and his band of fascists have all the power here. We have power and they have claimed that they’re for working people. We’re going to use that to our advantage. You see Bernie Sanders saying Trump said one of the campaign promises was to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. Let’s do it, man. Let’s go hold these people accountable. Don’t just sit around and wait for the bad shit to happen. Let’s go on offense here. And we have a real opportunity to do that with labor and awakened labor, a burgeoning labor movement. Starbucks workers and Amazon workers who were on strike over the holidays showing the power of labor, not looking at this from a lot of people saying, “Oh my God, going into their bunkers next four years, terrified, worried about all these things.” No, we’re going to keep taking action. We’re going to keep doing what we need to do and we’re going to keep tackling capital. Because the problem here is that capitalism is in control and capitalism has gone to a place where there is no check on it without labor. And capitalism doesn’t give a shit about any human being. It’s only about extracting as much profits as possible. And we see that very clearly. The other thing that’s been really defined since that first Trump presidency is just how bad the inequality is and just how gross it is that there is someone like Elon Musk who could practically double his wealth in the time from the election until now. That is insane. And we can’t just let that go on. We got to attack that right where it exists. We got to organize at Tesla, we got to organize at Amazon. Workers have to rise up. That’s what we’re going to have to do. And frankly, I actually think we can make some great gains if we really get on this and understand this. And we also have to understand that when they come for our sisters and brothers and union and siblings who they don’t want to have here because of the color of their skin, that is a fundamental, one of the four Ds from the Union Busters, divide, delay, distract and demoralize. And they’re going to do that to try to continue to distract us, to make us believe that we’re at odds with people that don’t look like us or we don’t have the same experiences. And we have to understand that taking on those fights too is tackling those union buster tactics that are going to weaken labor. We cannot stick our head in the sand and think that’s not our fight. And so anyway, as we take on all of this, and we really understand that when we follow that formula of defining the problem, setting the demands, backing it up with what you’re willing to do and understanding the urgency of the moment to get everyone’s attention, we can actually win. Maximillian Alvarez: I want to pick up on that point about how the attempts to divide us are going to be central to everything moving forward. As you said, going after immigrants, going after trans people, these are the proverbial low hanging fruit, but these are also human beings that our fellow workers are being convinced are their enemies, while our actual enemies are destroying our planet and enriching themselves in corrupting our democracy, yada, yada, yada. But another category of worker that is going to be ostracized and in fact already is, our government employees. And you were really making that point years ago that these were not nameless, faceless, useless bureaucrats. These were human beings providing essential labor. And this is what we can expect in the coming months pretty immediately. Because you mentioned holding Trump to his campaign promises. It was so apparent to me, and I think everyone with two brain cells that Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, acting like he had no idea what it is. Then he gets elected, turns right around and reappoints the primary author of it to lead his staff while also appointing a bunch of Project 2025 authors all throughout his cabinet. So first off, he was telling you, the voter, fuck you, I got what I wanted and now I’m going to do what I said I wasn’t going to do. But I think it is telling, you mentioned the union buster tactics, and this is a type of governance that we can actually learn from how bosses and CEOs operate to understand how these people think about government and think about us. And one of the linchpins of Project 2025 is a union buster tactic is to take tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of federal employees, reclassify them, make them easier to fire, make it harder for them to object to directives that are coming from the Trump administration, yada, yada, yada. I wanted to ask as one of our first salvos in this fight where the Trump and the GOP, Fox News, all the arrayed forces in the MAGA movement are going to try to do what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin 10 years ago and pit the public against public sector workers. So what can we learn from the fight in 2019 that can help people not fall into that trap of saying, yeah, fuck those guys. This is all government waste and I don’t need to care about these people? Sara Nelson: Well, for example, if you actually believe that you’ve earned your social security benefits and it should be there for you, and it shouldn’t be cut, it shouldn’t be undermined, then you have to defend the federal workers. A lot of people are talking about the fact the federal workers are going to be at the tip of the sphere of the labor movement. They’re going to face the first onslaught of attacks. But we can’t just keep it defined that way. That’s sort of like saying, we’re going to tweet hashtag Pro act every day and hope that it passes. And so I think that what we have to do is we have to talk about the work that they’re doing and what that means in people’s everyday lives. And that is going to bring the, that’s going to build power that’s going to bring the community to these fights because it’s not just about the attack on workers’ rights. That’s really about just trying to make it easier to dismantle all of these social programs that keep that basic safety net and needs to be strengthened. Let’s face it, it’s one of the worst in the entire developed world, but if we care about these programs, we got to talk about that’s what they’re trying to do. Because if they move the social security offices, this is another tactic for them and say, oh, it’s too expensive to have that in DC. We’re going to move it actually to another state. Those workers have to decide, am I going to uproot my family and go to that other state? This is another way that they’re going to try to very quickly get rid of people, and we have to understand the programs that they’re trying to dismantle too. The VA, our veterans need a hell of a lot more care for what they have been put through on the front lines of battle, and they want to dismantle the VA which has a higher rating than any other hospital or healthcare program in the country. And so we really have to be very clear about what these attacks mean and not just be lulled into a place that’s saying, this is just about worker rights that is popular. Everyone wants to be in unions, but people don’t really understand that. They can’t really identify with that. We have to make this real to people and what it’s going to mean in their lives about why these attacks on federal workers is going to affect them and their families and hurt them and understand that this is all of our fights. Maximillian Alvarez: I have so many more questions and I could talk to you for hours, but I know you’re a busy woman. I got to let you go in a few minutes. So I wanted to just, by way of wrapping up, kind of ask the big scary question here about what are working people and the labor movement actually facing with the second Trump term? I think people are maybe naively saying they’re saying we got to organize, but in a naive sense, without considering all the ways that a anti-labor NLRB is going to make it a lot harder for people to organize unions on the shop floor kind of thing. So we got to be clear-eyed about what we’re actually facing. And I wanted to ask from your vantage point, what are we actually facing as working people as a labor movement that has already suffered four-plus decades of direct attack? But also, to ask if you could round us out on bringing us back down to the ground floor here and talk about the organizing efforts that you and your union and your members are involved in right now and why people should care about that and what they can do to get involved in that as a way to flex the power and to remind themselves that we are not powerless moving into these next four years. Sara Nelson: So first of all, I just want to note that we have laws in place. We have the NLRA, we have the Railroad Labor Act that we work under. We have the FLRA for federal employees, and the laws are slightly different in each of these areas, but those laws were all put in place because there was mass disruption that led to corporations wanting to have laws that would give them some order, would give them an ability to resolve disputes. So the attacks to try to dismantle the NLRB, to try to dismantle the NLRA altogether is a little bit laughable because workers actually flex their power a hell of a lot more when there were no restrictions on the strike, when there was no restrictions on how they could actually fight the boss. And people are angry. People are together, and so they should be very, very careful about what they’re doing in order to dismantle these laws because they’re going to unhandcuff workers too. But it is difficult. I’m not trying to be Pollyanna-ish about this. This is very difficult because when you are asking a worker to stand up in their workplace, there’s a lot of fear there. They got to take that paycheck. They have a family that’s counting on them or other people who are counting on them. Maybe it’s roommates because they can’t afford to live alone on the wages that they’re making. And so it can be very fearful. But I think about the warrior met strike at the beginning of the last four years and what those miners went through in Alabama and how that unfair labor practice strike that they went out on, they got confirmation later after the strike had been broken by the company that they were right, that they were in the right, the law was on their side, but the state was not. The state governor used troopers with tax funds from the people who lived in that state to escort scabs from other states to go in and break that strike line. There were injunctions that put the union at a place where they had to be, I think it was 900 feet from the entrance to any mine. Well, let me tell you, this is in the hollers of West Virginia that’s out in the trees somewhere. And so they did everything they could to try to take away workers’ power in that fight. And I think that we have to recognize that we’re going to have to organize no matter what and help people understand the Mother Jones call to action that she gave us when she said, if you only understand that you hold the solution to the whole problem in the palm of your hand. If for example, every worker were to simply hold up and stop working, the capitalists would yield to any and all demands because the world could simply not go on. The anarchists never wanted to sign a contract because they wanted to have the power to strike whenever they needed to. They’d get the provisions in place at the workplace, and the next time the company screwed up, they’d go out on strike again. And so sometimes these contracts and these rules actually undermine worker power if we truly understand that in our hearts and our heads. And I’m not saying that that’s the model we should follow, but we have to recognize that there is real power in that when there’s a consciousness in the workers and that solidarity that runs through all of working people that can really hold these people to account. And that’s what we can do. So we’re organizing at Delta, most of the airline industry organized with the pilots in the 1930s. The rest of the workers mostly organized in the 1940s. We’re 80% organized in our industry. Imagine what this country would look like if every industry had 80% of workers and unions. But we are organizing, there are over 28,000 flight attendants. I just got word that Delta plans to hire more to try to dilute because they’re very worried that we’re going to get to a vote here. We have more momentum than we’ve ever had. We’re in a big push to try to file so that we can have jurisdiction under the current National Mediation Board. And it’s really tough because under the RLA, you have to sign physical cards and get a majority of those cards. And those cards are only good for a year. And if you have churn like that, when Delta hires more, they have the new people who just came out of company training who have just been through the whole union busting integration with the company. And then the people who are more seasoned will take the leaves to be off, the unpaid leaves and be at home. And so there’s a lot of hurdles in place, but we’re making more inroads than ever at Delta. And imagine finally taking on this company that has been able to make more money than any other airline off the backs of the workers because they have total control there and winning in Atlanta. And that winning turns into more winning. When workers saw all across this country, when workers saw baristas standing up at Starbucks, this sparked an entire movement because people are saying, oh yes. Not only are these workers willing to do this but it seems like these are workers that wouldn’t have any power because these jobs are not really necessary. They’re all the ways that we have defined work to try to undermine the value of that work, that is the epitome of a Starbucks barista. And yet, these workers have shown their value by taking action, organizing together and calling an entire nation to be behind them in this organizing campaign. That’s where we need to be. But I’ll tell you something else, the kind of organizing that we need to do is not going to be done just by the unions that exist today. If every single union did spend the amount of money that we’re spending on Delta organizing, it still wouldn’t be enough to meet the demand of people everywhere who want to join a union. So the other thing that I’m working on is a project called Union Now that would essentially for those of you who are familiar with Super Charge E-walk, be a place where any worker can call up and get help to organize their workplace but also get help with with organizers, communications with attorneys, and have that backing through that first contract. And this would not be an intention to build up a membership base. This would be an intention for Union Now to actually put itself out of business because you get everybody into their unions, you get their contracts in place, and we’ve got to have that kind of focus. We’re going to be doing massive fundraising around this to try to make this work and stand this program up. It’s the kind of thing that we need right now to build worker power and have the kind of worker power that we need to put in check capitalism that has run amuck and has us in a place where a guy who’s building a dick rocket to head off to Mars while he leaves the rest of us on a burning earth is held to account because the working people in his workplaces hold up any more profits that he can possibly make.