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Keeping calm at 30,000 feet:
Portlander Veda Shook rises to top job in flight attendants union
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
“Just about every flight attendant
gets hired thinking they’re going to do
it for a couple of years and see the
world,” says Veda Shook, a 20-year
Alaska Airlines flight attendant with
ties to Portland. But some flight atten-
dants discover a passion for the profes-
sion. They strive to make it a good ca-
reer, not just a job.
Shook, on Jan. 1, took office as pres-
ident of the 42,000-member Associa-
tion of Flight Attendants (AFA) — 13
years after getting involved with the
union. At 43, she’s one of America’s
youngest national union leaders. She
will steer a union that is straining to se-
cure first-time contracts at newly-union-
ized airlines and mourning a spectacu-
lar union election loss among 20,000
flight attendants at Delta Air Lines.
Shook was living in a truck and
camper when she first moved to Port-
land in 1991 with a degree in interna-
tional affairs from University of Col-
orado Boulder. A friend suggested she
apply for a job as a flight attendant.
“Flight attendants tend to have wan-
derlust in their personalities,” Shook
says. That description fit her well.
Hired at Alaska Airlines, she fell in
love with the job. But her co-workers
were at that time preparing for a high-
stakes showdown with management.
When contract bargaining broke down
and a strike cooling-off period ended in
June 1993, management imposed sig-
nificant cuts in pay and pensions and
declared Alaska Airlines a nonunion
employer. To serve as strikebreakers in
the event of a walkout by union mem-
bers, Alaska trained hundreds of its of-
fice workers as flight attendants.
AFA needed a strategy, or all would
be lost. So it tried something new: a
campaign of picketing and intermittent
strikes that it called CHAOS (Create
Havoc Around Our System). Flight at-
tendants would strike individual flights
anywhere and anytime without notice.
Management would never know, until a
plane was about to depart.
“The public went bananas,” Shook
recalls. “Bookings dropped.”
Union flight attendants committed
civil disobedience and were arrested at
Alaska’s Seattle headquarters. Several
months into the CHAOS campaign,
Alaska management agreed to a new
contract — with raises of up to 60 per-
cent.
Shook learned about solidarity on
her strike picket line. But deeper in-
volvement in the union was to come
later. Low in seniority, she was fur-
Veda Shook, then AFA-CWA International Vice President, testifies before the
antitrust subcommittee of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, at an April 24,
2008 hearing about the impacts of the merger of Delta Air Lines and
Northwest Airlines.
loughed, and when she returned to
work, she got very few shifts. A union
rep fought to keep Shook from losing
her health benefits, and not a moment
too soon. At an annual training, Shook
began to feel weak. Her skin had turned
yellow. She was diagnosed with an
auto-immune blood disorder. Doctors
had to operate to remove her spleen.
Union-won health insurance kept her
from financial ruin and maybe even
saved her life.
Not long after, an Alaska manager,
plainly unfamiliar with Shook’s health
problems, called her in to warn that her
attendance record was not up to the air-
line’s standards. Shook said it became
clear to her in that moment how impor-
tant a union is. So when a union rep
asked her to get involved, Shook ac-
cepted appointment in 1997 as presi-
dent of the newly-created AFA Local
39 in Portland, and went on to become
a member organizer on AFA’s 1999-
2002 Delta Air Lines campaign.
“That work fundamentally changed
who I am as a human being,” Shook
said. “I started working with Delta
flight attendants and saw the massive
subjugation of those employees, and
the fear. It shattered my world to see
what the difference is [between union-
ized and non-unionized workplaces].”
AFA lost the 2002 vote at Delta, but
Shook turned her newly-honed organ-
izer skills to get members at Alaska
ready for the next contract campaign.
She became top officer of all the Alaska
Airlines locals, facing management in a
new round of tough bargaining. She
formed a committee, VOICE (Volun-
teer Organizers for Information, Com-
munication and Education), and got
members to approve a $3 monthly as-
sessment to fund member mobilization.
She nursed her new-born daughter at
the bargaining table, and broke into
tears in a meeting with Alaska Airlines’
CEO at one point. But in the end, she
helped win a contract that contained
wage increases and more family-
friendly work rules — during the post-
9/11-period when other union groups
were agreeing to across-the-board cuts.
In 2003, AFA merged into 500,000-
member Communications Workers of
America, keeping its autonomy and its
own identity.
Then, after 15 years of living on-
and-off in Portland, Shook won elec-
tion as AFA vice president in 2006 and
moved to Washington, D.C. She was
put in charge of AFA’s organizing pro-
gram, and helped unionize flight atten-
dants at Lynx Aviation, Ryan Interna-
tional and USA3000.
She wasn’t given direction of AFA’s
third union campaign at Delta, how-
ever, and it pained her to see the union
lose. When 20,000 Delta flight atten-
dants turned down union representation
in a close vote, the sub-group of 7,500
flight attendants that had worked at
merged Northwest Airlines lost their
existing union contract.
Regrouping after that loss will be a
task for the new leader, along with
unionizing other airlines, and negotiat-
ing acceptable first contracts at recently
unionized carriers.
Shook also wants to push flight at-
tendants to see themselves as first re-
sponders — not just high-altitude food
servers.
“We’re paid to make our work seem
effortless, to keep calm at 30,000 feet.
And we’re so good at it that 90 percent
of passengers don’t know when there’s
been a medical emergency on a flight
until we’ve landed,” Shook says.
Shook still works shifts sometime at
Alaska, a habit which she says helps
keep her connected to the job, and to
AFA members.
“I love being a flight attendant,”
Shook says. “This job is the best-kept
secret.”
The AFA —Shook says — is what
enables her and her fellow flight atten-
dants to turn the job that they love into
a career that can sustain them.
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JANUARY 21, 2011
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
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