TO THE SEA-TAC TRAVELERS lined up at the skycap stands, it must have been a remarkable sight. A diminutive and quite obviously pregnant woman, barely five feet tall and dressed in black with a white clerical collar, was absorbed in conversation with a burly police officer and a Port of Seattle manager. It was early on the morning of September 11, 2012, rush hour for travelers disembarking from taxis and friends’ cars for the curbside check-in counters at Sea-Tac. What they saw as they stood in line was not an exchange of sidewalk small talk, but an earnest discussion about whether the Reverend Lauren Cannon was prepared to go to jail that morning.
Cannon had been handing out flyers to travelers about poverty-wage jobs at the airport, acting in direct violation of the port’s rules, which barred leafleting on the sidewalk outside the terminal. The Port of Seattle, a municipal government, had established rules to maintain order; she was in obvious breach. Was she going to follow the law?
She was not.
“I understood this was part of my constitutional right to offer basic information,” Cannon told Sergeant Mark Tanga and the airport duty manager, Ruth Shumeye. Her voice was pleasant but resolute.
“You don’t have permission to be out here,” Shumeye responded.
Cannon held her ground. “So if we continue to give information, what would happen?”
Shumeye didn’t reply. Instead, she and Sergeant Tanga turned and retreated to consult with other port officials, warily eyeing the proceedings from behind the glass terminal doors. And as skycaps and other baggage handlers looked on with delight, Reverend Cannon resumed her outreach to passengers, welcoming them to Sea-Tac Airport with her information about poverty jobs. The port’s rules were trumped, at least for that morning.
The standoff between Cannon and the port authorities was a small taste of the brewing conflict between the Port of Seattle, which operates the airport, and union organizers working with the airport’s low-wage baggage and cargo handlers, cabin cleaners, fuelers, rental car and food and retail workers, and wheelchair attendants.
For months union staff had been circulating through the airport, huddling with workers at all hours to discuss organizing plans, circulate petitions, and plot out actions. Our breakthrough in relations with the Muslim community meant that East African workers were now getting involved in the organizing. Other workers, sensing momentum, also began to engage as 2012 progressed. Under the watchful eye of port and airline authorities, workers were beginning to meet in larger numbers at baggage claim carousels, in the smoking area, at terminal coffee shops, and by the security doors they used to go to work. And they were beginning to take visible action, too, showing up at airline offices with community supporters to demand fair pay, and handbilling travelers with startling information about filthy and unsafe working conditions. For the airlines, trouble was brewing as 2012 progressed.
If there was a single image that embodied the growing worker courage, it was the face of Hosea Wilcox. A skycap, Wilcox had been involved in organizing for most of the thirty-one years he worked the airport curb, employed by a series of minimum-wage airline contractors. Over the years Wilcox had been featured on TV segments about low airport wages, and he was a familiar face to business travelers. Beginning in the spring of 2012, Wilcox had starred in airport digital ads that Working Washington had purchased, taking advantage of the port’s lenient ad content policies. Every day tens of thousands of travelers awaiting their luggage at each of the airport’s sixteen baggage claim carousels could look up and see the visage of Wilcox and his call for better pay. Doubtless airline and port executives regarded the ads as subversive intrusions into their domain.
When Delta decided to change skycap contractors, the new firm declined to hire Wilcox and two other union activists. In response, a group of thirty-five workers and allies took over the Delta Airlines ticket counter one morning, refusing to leave until a manager reconsidered hiring Wilcox and the others. A week after the Delta sit-in, activists dressed up fifty large suitcases with oversized signs denouncing Delta Airlines, rented wheeled luggage carts, and paraded the suitcases through the terminal at a leisurely pace.
Port officials looked on askance. Traditional picketing and sign carrying were strictly forbidden within the terminal, but in this case protesters were doing what thousands of air passengers did every day at Sea-Tac: rent luggage carts and haul them through the airport. Delta managers complained bitterly to port officials as the single-file picket line of carts cruised slowly past their waiting passengers.
It was my job, as the campaign director, to field the increasingly insistent demands from port representatives that organizers stop breaking their rules. Under established court precedent, bolstered by the specter of 9/11, US airports have wide latitude to restrict the time, place, and manner of First Amendment activities. As organizing activity ramped up, port officials clamped down. Their attorneys sent us threatening letters: We weren’t supposed to gather large numbers of people, except in designated places. We weren’t allowed to handbill the public without the port’s permission. We weren’t allowed to picket anywhere on the airport property. And we certainly weren’t allowed to occupy ticket counters and disrupt business. Though the port was a public agency with elected commissioners nominally accountable to the greater community, its leaders were frank in telling us that their main customers—the primary constituency they cared about—were the airlines and major airport concession companies. These business customers were unhappy with the organizing activity and were pressing the port, as the landlord, to take action.
Following the Delta ticket counter sit-in, an annoyed port CEO, Tay Yoshitani, e-mailed Port of Seattle commissioners: “I’m afraid this will all happen once again. But know that Delta is upset with the port for not being more aggressive in enforcement of existing rules. We can’t allow our customers/passengers to be subjected to aggressive demonstrations. Wish I had better news for you.”1 Yoshitani directed his legal team to develop a counterattack.
We had a different view about what legal restrictions could be imposed on our organizing activities, and knew that we’d only secure our rights if we asserted them. We also knew that eventually things would reach a crisis with the port.
In late July workers and their allies staged another action inside the airport. Cabin cleaners, fed up with abuse from supervisors, broken equipment, and constant demands to hurry up, confronted Alaska Airlines management and demanded that the airline crack down on its contractor. A vacuum cleaner had caught on fire; workers were ordered to keep using it. The vans used to shuttle workers between planes lacked seat belts and working doors. The contractor ran out of gloves and told workers to make do without. Managers yelled at the cleaners to hurry up. So one morning workers surrounded the Alaska station manager in the middle of the terminal and downloaded their frustration as travelers navigated their way around the crowd. Port officials looked on, visibly disgruntled.
A month later, on the eve of Labor Day weekend, the port struck back, announcing it was instituting new rules limiting organizing activities. The new rules required the port’s advance permission for leafleting and for gathering groups, barred delegations to airlines and other businesses, required that organizations submit to the port the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all participants in group activities, and imposed new penalties for violators that included banishment from the airport. As for sorting out the innocent from the guilty, port staff would serve as police, prosecutor, judge, and jury. Port officials knew they held the upper hand in a legal fight. We might kick up a political protest but couldn’t expect the general public to rally to the defense of organizing rights within the airport. We could challenge the new rules in court, but we’d be stuck there for a long time, with uncertain results. In the meantime the airport organizing, which relied upon meeting with workers at the airport, would wither.
To overcome the new restrictions, we had to take the fight beyond the political and legal terrain. We had to turn the right to organize at the airport into a moral question.
REVEREND CANNON WAS well suited to play a leading role in this unfolding drama. When port officials confronted her on the morning of September 11, they may have believed that, armed with their new arsenal of restrictions, a few pointed words would back her down. They had no basis to know that they were confronting an activist whose commitment to justice work had been cultivated in terrain much harsher than the curbside of an international airport. Years prior, after the first US-Iraq war, Cannon had joined peace delegations to Basra, Iraq, openly flouting the federal embargo and prison threats. She studied civil disobedience with Jesuit activist Phil Berrigan and had spent thirty days in a Massachusetts maximum-security state prison after blockading a Raytheon cruise missile manufacturing site. Living among hungry Iraqi children and then carrying pictures of the kids into the cruise missile plant were transformative experiences for the young activist. “We are sourced in a liberating god,” she realized. “A god who has a preferential eye for those who are struggling. This is not just talk—for many of us, taking serious risks ourselves is part of trying to follow in the way of Jesus.” Cannon’s path through Basra, Raytheon, and prison led her to seminary school in Chicago, and eventually to the pulpit of Keystone United Church of Christ in Seattle, where she encouraged congregation members to engage in acts of social liberation.
Earlier in 2012 Cannon had been approached by organizers from Puget Sound Sage, a community group that had joined with the unions and Working Washington on the airport campaign. The Sage organizers were building a coalition of faith leaders and activists to support the organizing, and wanted her to meet some of the workers. Keystone’s members didn’t work at the airport—they were a smattering of professionals, academics, and retirees. But social justice had been a long-time mission of the church. Cannon readily agreed to meet with airport workers, and in the ensuing months came to see their struggles as a core part of her ministry.
What Cannon understood—more than the port officials did that September morning—was the power of the moral voice in overcoming legal threats. “All the rules and regulations that the airport authorities were trying to hang things on couldn’t hold a candle to the spirit of truth,” she recounted later. “My history of nonviolence comes into step in these moments. There was a true spirit as we engaged with the airport travelers, where you just know that you’re speaking from and representing a truth that needs to get out.”
Reverend Cannon kept handing out leaflets that morning, openly defying the port authorities because to her there was a higher law. And, being an experienced activist, she also knew that the port leadership was smart enough to avoid the public relations mess of handcuffing a gentle, diminutive minister who was in her third trimester of pregnancy.
THE CAMPAIGN LEADERSHIP recognized that it would be difficult to tackle head-on the airport’s political and economic powers. Alaska Airlines was a multibillion-dollar company with a sparkling public reputation for reliable service, good customer relations, and the down-home feeling of a local company. Port leadership felt largely immune from popular pressure. True, they were elected by King County voters, but in elections that saw the major shipping lines, retail companies, and airlines contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to hand select their chosen representatives. Nominally a democratic institution, the port commission was a government captive to corporate interests.
To win the economic and political fight, we had to alter the terrain of the struggle. We also recognized that many workers, even those who don’t explicitly identify as religious, would be emboldened to overcome their own fears and get involved as they saw and heard from respected members of faith communities. For workers, the presence of faith leadership shifted the fight from workplace issues—demands for higher pay or benefits, more work hours, and so on—to a struggle based on values: a morally based call for human dignity at the airport.
Too often union organizing campaigns focus exclusively on the economic and political dimensions of the fight, bringing in faith leaders to play accessory roles only once things are well under way. The term that organizers casually use is “rent-a-collar.” Religious leaders are asked to help campaigns, often with little notice and when the campaign trajectory is already established; perhaps in a crisis. Virtually everyone involved in these tactics—from the organizers to the recruited faith leaders—recognizes tacitly the limited nature of the relationship. Everyone plays their roles. The campaign needs a validating faith voice, but is not seeking strategic guidance from these outsiders. Faith leaders are asked to stand up and justify on moral terms an economic struggle that they did not initiate or plan. The cameras roll, the ministers recite their lines ably, and afterward the organizers thank them. The campaign moves on, and the corporate target can brush off the transitory discomfort.
It’s quite different to ask faith leaders to help at the beginning to build a morally grounded campaign. A movement that is defined around values and principles is more apt to weather the ups and downs of organizing. Opponents can take the air out of an issuesbased campaign by co-opting the issue or meeting demands halfway. Unilateral pay raises, replacing an unpopular supervisor, improving staffing levels temporarily—these sorts of accommodations defuse protest energy and ensure that the company retains a firm grip on power. In a morally grounded campaign, what develops is still a fight that—outwardly—is about workplace or community issues. But a morally grounded campaign is more durable in confronting economic and political power because it derives from values, which can’t be co-opted.
On their own, most union organizers lack the credibility to lead a fight based on values. Workers see unions as issue-based organizations. They see organizers as the experts who can propose and implement strategies to achieve concrete goals: a wage increase, safety and job protections, and so on. Values go deeper. A partnership with faith leaders, initiated at the beginning of a campaign, is essential to build an authentic values foundation.
The first opportunity to test this approach came four months before Reverend Cannon’s sidewalk standoff, inside the May 15, 2012, shareholders meeting of Alaska Airlines. A delegation of thirty-seven Christian and Muslim leaders, workers, organizers, community allies, and a local elected official had gained admission to the auditorium. We were a combination of allies who had purchased single shares of stock or who held proxies authorized to represent other shareholders, like union pension funds. We filed into the auditorium and dispersed through the crowd of two hundred other shareholders, executives, and members of Alaska’s board of directors. Our aim was to force the company to meet directly with community leaders and workers.
This shareholders gathering was to be a coronation, a handing off of the CEO baton from Bill Ayer to longtime Alaska executive Brad Tilden. It also would celebrate yet another year of record profits. A northwest native, Tilden had grown up three miles from Sea-Tac Airport, earned business degrees at local universities, and risen through the ranks at Alaska over the course of two decades. Genial and unassuming, he was an exemplary choice to lead the Sea-Tac-based airline in its next stage of expansion and battle against larger multinational carriers.
Now, barely fifty years old and standing on the stage at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, Tilden graciously accepted a handshake from Ayer and told the shareholders that one of Ayer’s enduring lessons to him was always to try to “do the right thing.” Tilden then deftly moved the gathered shareholders and board members through an impressive PowerPoint presentation of the company’s profits and expansion plans. The shareholders applauded. Tilden opened the floor for questions. He was aware of the presence of several airport workers and their allies, but probably didn’t foresee what was about to unfold. And, truthfully, neither did we.
First up at the mic was the Reverend Josh Liljenstople, a retired minister: “You mentioned that, Mr. Ayer, you can count on him to always do the right thing,” Liljenstople said. His tone was inquiring and civil. “My question is, was it right to create this situation with critical employees, turning them over to subcontractors who are not paying an adequate wage, in view of the fact that the disparity of income in our country is tearing our society apart?”2
Standing alone on the stage, Tilden deflected from the critique of Alaska in an effort to find common ground on the bigger economic picture. “One of the things our country needs more than anything right now is good-paying jobs,” he began. “I totally agree there is more disparity to many income levels, and that’s what America needs to get our country moving again, so I totally agree with that.
“We think that if we run a good business we will be able to be a good employer and we will grow good jobs and grow good high-quality jobs, and that will help get our economy moving, it will help get people employed in these jobs. So that is our view of the best way to approach this, but I do respect that other folks would come to this from a different position.”
Tilden may have wanted to conciliate with Northwest niceness, but his words only incited the gathering dissent.
Alex Popescu, an airport fueler, shot out of his seat. “I served twelve years in the military, honorable discharge, combat tours in Kosovo, Afghanistan, three times in Iraq. I have to choose between putting gas in my car or food on my family’s table, because I work for one of your substandard paying subcontractors. I am the face of it,” he said.
Tilden shuffled uncertainly on the stage.
“Oh, put your feet to the fire, huh? At a loss for words,” Popescu challenged him.
“If it’s time for me to respond, I will,” said Tilden. “The first thing I would do is thank you for your service to our country.”
Popescu cut him off. “By paying me a better wage!”
Tilden turned to the other side of the room, where a second mic stood. Perhaps this questioner would be less acerbic.
“I want to thank the executives,” began Mark Glover. “Obviously you guys have done a great job. Over the last couple of years we’ve made a quarter billion dollars profit each year. Not bad at all. We know we’ve got a lot of power in the room.”
Tilden relaxed, blind to the setup.
“Your presentation was kind of the direction I was going in, about doing the right thing, taking care of your stakeholders,” continued Glover, a hospital nurse and union activist. Then turning to face the crowd of shareholders, he said, “Just show of hands, maybe even applause, I think a lot of people have the same idea. We’re looking for fair wages for your frontline employees, and the ones we’re talking about are the contract employees. And maybe it’s just time for Alaska Airlines to pay fair wages, what do you think?”
The room echoed with applause as the meeting slipped from the CEO’s grasp.
Truth be told, campaign organizers hadn’t imagined such a wide operating latitude. Corporate shareholder meetings are tightly orchestrated events. Opposing voices are given limited time to speak, if any. Troublemakers are quickly removed by hired security staff. Organizers had trained the thirty-seven workers and allies to expect to have fifteen to thirty seconds at the most to speak. Prior to the meeting we had people practice, over and over, the three or four sentences that we thought they would be limited to. We reminded people to breathe, to not be nervous when speaking up, and to speak loudly because we probably would be denied access to microphones. We rehearsed what to do if we were evicted by security.
What we discovered in the actual confrontation was that the bestlaid plans and meticulous training became superfluous as the opening salvos—Reverend Liljenstople’s gentle grace and Popescu’s venting rage—unlocked the floodgates. A psychological barrier had been collectively shattered. The CEO wasn’t invincible after all. Fear melted away and the prepared statements we had spent hours rehearsing were cast aside in favor of stories, passion, and argumentation that tumbled forth while speakers lifted the fight from economic terrain to a moral plateau.
Anita Manuel, a chaplain, stood to speak. “I watched your presentation, when it got to targeted outsourcing, I said, ‘I really think there is a problem here.’ What I think of it as is pulling a Walmart. And I know something about Walmart because my mother knew Sam and Helen Walton before that company lost its ethical compass. And I’m concerned about this company losing its ethical compass,” she said.
“So the question that I have is what are you and the other officers going to do to be honest about the effects of your actions, and to accept your responsibility as Sea-Tac’s major air carrier and one that sets the standard for healthy conditions, not only for your own employees but also for all of the workers that provide services for you at Sea-Tac?”
“Thank you for your question,” Tilden said. “I’m trying to listen, and trying to not be defensive.”
Michael Douglas, a Sufi minister, stood up and introduced himself as an Alaska shareholder. “By and large I’m very proud of our ethical and moral record as a company,” he said. “I’d just like to point out that outsourcing jobs does not give us moral insulation, even though it gives us legal and economic insulation.”
Laura Davenport, a University of Washington clerical worker and union activist who lived just north of Sea-Tac’s runways, talked about meeting her neighbors who work at the airport. “I got a lot of really interesting feedback from people about how they can’t make ends meet, how multiple families are living in one home because of poverty wages,” she said.
“I live right across the street from my child’s elementary school,” Davenport continued, “where a lot of these other kids go to school. And I watched my kid bundle up, get him out the door in one of his many coats, because he’s always losing them, right? And I watched other kids walking the neighborhood not wearing coats. Their families—and I recognized these kids as the children of contract airport workers—their families cannot afford coats. I listened to the school principal put out an appeal begging families that could donate reasonable coats to do so, so that all the children in my child’s school could go to school with a coat on. This is wrong.
“This company is profitable, this company will continue to be profitable, and I will continue to be a proud shareholder of this company,” Davenport said. “I want this company to step up, lead the way, and model the ethical behavior that it’s founded on.”
There wasn’t much that Tilden could say about children lacking winter coats. He looked at the clock. “Okay, just in the interest of time, I think we’re approaching three thirty, maybe one final question and then we’ll break for the afternoon.” The barrage had been going on nonstop for nearly forty-five minutes. Three thirty couldn’t come soon enough for the new CEO.
The Reverend John Helmiere stood to speak, thanked Tilden for listening to everyone, and issued a challenge. “Are you willing, within the first sixty days of your tenure as CEO, to meet with the actual folks who are doing this work and to listen? Listen as compassionately and openly as you’ve been listening to us, and maybe that might inspire change.”
Yes, said Tilden, he would meet.
With the CEO’s concession in hand, we could declare victory on our goal for the day. The emboldened thirty-seven participants left the auditorium excited, having experienced the power of confronting our adversary directly in his home turf. That taste of success boosted the confidence of workers and organizers as we headed back into the airport to spread the good news that Alaska’s CEO had agreed to talk.
BEYOND THE POLITICAL WIN, many of us leaving the meeting were coming to appreciate the formation of a different organizing framework. On our side, we had righteous indignation due to poverty-wage jobs and limitless corporate greed. Tilden was comfortable engaging in that arena. He had the data and industry history to support Alaska’s decision to contract out work to low-wage companies. He was confident in his analysis and Alaska’s business plan. And he knew that a significant sector of the general public, especially editorialists, pundits, and the political establishment, would accept the trickle-down economics argument that a successful Alaska Airlines would grow jobs and income. But Tilden had no answer to the assertion that the company’s practices lacked moral insulation, or to the question of why the children of airport workers had to go begging for coats.
This was powerful stuff. But the challenge for those of us in union leadership was to avoid the tendency to look at faith allies in a utilitarian role, as credible voices subordinate to a political agenda. Moreover, faith leaders would instinctively shy away from activities that seemed to exploit religion for political advancement. It seems cheap, even coarse to employ scripture or deeply held beliefs as tools to advance a material cause.
The subtle but crucial distinction that some of us were beginning to grasp was the power, not of the moral argument in service to political demands, but instead political demands made on the basis of a moral foundation. To Reverend Helmiere and his colleagues, public speaking by clergy “is indeed a plea for justice and social change, but the roots of it aren’t an economic agenda or political agenda.” Rather, he said, the economic or political agenda is an outgrowth of faith and spirituality.
At the 2012 shareholders meeting, Reverend Helmiere, Michael Douglas, Laura Davenport, and others were shifting the terrain from dollars and cents to values and justice, challenging the company not with math problems contained in corporate balance sheets, but with moral questions of how executives ought to be treating their fellow human beings.
This also proved to be a learning moment for us on the role of theology and scripture in the campaign. Most faith leaders seemed reluctant to openly raise scripture or theological teachings in the rallies, press conferences, and other public events we staged.
But in more private gatherings, in mosques, churches, and community meeting halls, faith leaders spoke passionately about the common thread woven between scripture and the modern-day struggle, and the power of story to motivate and sustain themselves and their congregants. To the Orcas Mosque’s Mohamed Sheikh Hassan, the Battle of Badr, where Muhammad and his ragtag band overcame an army ten times their size, served as an instructive lesson for Muslim Sea-Tac workers, he told me. “The Prophet understood that ‘Yes, they are more than us, but we are on the right track. If what we have is true faith, then we will overcome,’” he said. Reverend Cannon quoted Jesus in the Book of Matthew, who said, “What you do for the least of these you do for me,” as a way to explain the moral imperative that placed her in confrontation with port authorities. For Reverend Jan Bolerjack, the newly arrived Sea-Tac minister, the airport campaign broke convention and rebelled against entrenched economic truths—like poverty wages—much as Jesus broke custom when he spoke to a Samaritan woman at the well.
These clergy were among those who formed the nucleus of our multifaith community meetings, where I often found myself invoking the Bible’s Exodus story, a common framework for the varied traditions and cultures of white mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians from Ethiopia and Eritrea, and Muslims from throughout East Africa. The tale of a people fleeing slavery to freedom, a story shared by all three Abrahamic faiths, stood as a fitting parable for the importance of fusing faith with human action to overcome obstacles. We knew we had to cross obstructions together, sometimes against all odds, just as the Children of Israel had crossed the Red Sea.
We didn’t have to wait long after the shareholders meeting to encounter one of those difficult moments. Tilden had agreed to meet with us, but as we approached the sixty-day deadline, no meeting was scheduled. The CEO’s staff had questions for us, but no dates. The sixty-day mark came and went in July, and still nothing was set.
Faith leaders came together and agreed that further earnest appeals to meet would be ineffective; as with the Hebrew slaves, they needed to escalate the pressure. In early September more than a dozen faith leaders marched at the front of a parade of five hundred people—airport workers, community allies, and home-care workers attending a nearby union convention—down the main boulevard in SeaTac to the headquarters of Alaska Airlines. In their hands the ministers and imams carried a letter signed by more than sixty area clergy and lay activists, calling on Tilden to fulfill his May promise.
The Reverend John Helmiere was one of the ministers at the front of the march, having been deputized by his colleagues to deliver the letter to Tilden. But as Helmiere marched he was feeling uneasy in the leadership role. A young, newly minted minister out of Yale Divinity School, Helmiere had arrived in Seattle two years prior with the goal of building a progressive spiritual congregation from the ground up. He had grown up in Tampa, Florida, where in church they encouraged you to feed the homeless but never discussed why there were homeless people in the first place.
So walking at the front of the march, surrounded by ministers and imams who each could count many years of pulpit time and flocks in the hundreds, Helmiere felt ill-equipped to the task of leading this delegation. They turned into Alaska’s corporate parking lot, and there he encountered another obstacle. A lone security officer waved Helmiere down and told him the group wouldn’t be allowed onto the private property. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I guess we can’t go on,’” Helmiere told me later. “I’d always operated in the world where there are rules and structures and laws and that’s just how everything works.”
Go on, I urged Helmiere, and then it occurred to the young minister that perhaps he didn’t have to follow the established rules. “There’s five hundred of us and there’s one security officer. Seeing the force of human organization was exciting.” Helmiere stepped forward. The crowd followed, surging around the security officer and to Alaska’s front door.
Flanked by airport workers, Helmiere knocked on the glass door. An Alaska manager came out, carefully shut the door behind him, and announced—no surprise—that CEO Brad Tilden was unavailable. But, he continued, Alaska’s director of public relations was eager to talk with a small number of clergy—inside, apart from the crowd. Did a delegation want to come in? Helmiere recalled scripture for his response. “It was like the temptation of Christ in the moment, like, ‘Oh, you can come in and have special access and be treated different.’ I said, ‘No, we go together or we don’t go in. You’re not going to split us off.’ It was a really insightful experience for me. It revealed a lot to me about how they saw us and the power of being together.”
Helmiere and the workers delivered the clergy letter to the manager outside, shook his hand, turned around, and left. The new minister, whose leadership at the shareholders meeting had shown union organizers the power of moral argument, had just gleaned an important union lesson about the power of collective action. A synergy was developing between the union organizers and faith leaders. And before September was over, we had a date scheduled with Brad Tilden.
TRADITIONALLY, WHEN UNIONS gain a direct audience with corporate leadership, they will send top union officials, and usually not even workers: the business union approach. But this time we wanted to let Tilden know he had to deal with the broader community, not just a labor union. The delegation that met Tilden in an airport conference room consisted of five faith leaders and three airport workers, plus one union staff, whose sole function inside the meeting was to translate. “So right up front, Brad Tilden and his folks know this—there is a moral side to the picture,” recalled the Reverend Paul Benz, a Lutheran minister and delegation member.
Workers took advantage of the opportunity to confront the CEO directly. Leon Sams, an aircraft fueler, told the Alaska executives about broken ladders, fuel nozzles, and carts. Samatar Abdullahi, the seventy-six-year-old cabin cleaner, recounted to Tilden the abuse his supervisor heaped on him when he tried to take time off to visit his hospitalized daughter. Baggage handler Tyler Steele told the executives about how managers on the tarmac constantly talked down to the workers and how he still lived with his parents because an apartment was financially out of reach.
Tilden and his executives were happy to engage on matters of safety and fair treatment. The CEO sympathetically allowed that Abdullahi’s treatment was “probably illegal.” And he admitted that the company could do better in sharing profits with contracted workers, though significant raises were out of the question. The company valued the work of these contractors, Tilden said. Perhaps, he mused, Alaska should sponsor job fairs and interview workshops to help workers move up to better jobs.
But the platitudes and commitments to address safety concerns dodged the main issues that centered on power: the delegation’s demand that Alaska respect workers’ right to form a union and bargain for living wages and benefits. On those topics, Tilden was blunt, recalled Sheikh Abduqadir Jama, the Al-Noor Mosque leader and one of the delegation members. “He said, ‘I am here defending the rights of the shareholders. My responsibility is to make profits for them. The people you’re advocating for are not directly employed by Alaska.’”
“The workers are not shareholders, but they are stakeholders,” Sheikh Jama rejoined. “They are the people who contribute to your company’s safety, cleanliness, success. You’re hired an intermediary company—but you’re the only ones who have the leverage to go to the intermediary and fix things.”
Sheikh Jama, Reverend Benz, and the other clergy knew that Tilden was not going to give ground in this first meeting. But they also recognized that they had forced a direct dialogue with a reluctant target, largely because of the moral voice that Tilden knew he would be unwise to ignore. The very occurrence of the meeting was proof that we were on the right track.
At the airport and in the community, reports of the meeting gave hope. Sheikh Jama told people at the mosque and his Islamic school about the encounter. They were thrilled. “They were saying, for the first time, their concerns were taken from their mouths, directly to the head of Alaska.” For a group of largely immigrant workers, to be able to reach the CEO of a major company was an accomplishment.
The meeting ended with handshakes and pleasantries, a commitment to keep talking. At moments like these, when the employer is willing to engage but not ready to concede, campaigners have an important decision to make. Should they hold off on protests to give the employer the opportunity to make a positive move, or ratchet up the pressure? There was strong agreement: the meeting with Tilden showed that we had his attention, but were far from getting his agreement to our demands. A few days later, as if to demonstrate the accuracy of this assessment, Menzies announced a 25-cent raise for Alaska baggage handlers—a recognition perhaps of the growing pressure, but a paltry sum given record airline profits. Workers fumed at the trivial bribe. It was time to escalate.
Reverend Helmiere, along with Reverend Bolerjack and other faith leaders, chose December 10, International Human Rights Day, for their next demonstration.
In the early afternoon of December 10, Bolerjack, joined by more than twenty clergy, many of them decked out in colorful stoles draped over their shoulders, walked into the airport with more than one hundred airport workers, community supporters, and organizers. Parading around the inside of the terminal, they carried colorful posters calling for respect for the human rights of airport workers.
The march emboldened workers, both those participating and those on the clock who watched as the parade traveled by. Wheelchair attendant Saba Belachew, who helped kick off the march with a call for workers’ rights, said the faith leaders gave workers the confidence to join in. “We let them go first,” Belachew, an Ethiopian immigrant, later recalled, referring to the clergy. When Alaska Airlines management and Sea-Tac travelers saw the crowd, “they saw the religious people first, and then they would see us.” For Belachew and other workers, this wasn’t about hiding behind the clergy, but rather presenting the faces of the moral argument ahead of the economic one.
The group gathered beside one of the baggage claim carousels for an opening prayer from the Reverend Dick Gillett, an Episcopal minister who recently had moved to Seattle after years of social activism in Los Angeles.
“We affirm that all human rights derive from the hand of the divine creator, who created all of us in God’s image,” Gillett began, comfortably shedding any reservations about introducing theology in mixed company. “Today, out of that faith, we underline the words of the United Nations Declaration, that ‘everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration, ensuring for himself or herself, and his or her family, an existence worthy of human dignity.’”
Port officials and police officers looked on but didn’t try to intervene. Thus far the faith-led crowd had broken the port’s rule against staging rallies and parading and picketing with signs inside the terminal. Now, headed for the Alaska Airlines ticket counter, we were about to break a few more rules. The Alaska ticket counters were built as kiosks in the middle of the floor, not against a wall. You could walk entirely around them, and that’s precisely what the demonstrators did, forming a picket line and launching into the church song, adapted for the moment: “Solid as a rock, rooted as a tree, we are here, standing strong, for airport workers.” Passengers turned their heads to see what the singing was about as the parade circled the ticket counters again and again.
For Reverend Gillett, a veteran of Southern California labor protests, the parade around the ticket counter recalled spring marches into Beverly Hills on behalf of hotel workers, where the ministers handed out Easter lilies to supportive employers and bitter herbs to the problematic ones. The ministers learned that their vestments and symbols helped them get into places and do things that would otherwise be off limits. Now circling the Alaska ticket counter, Gillett felt that power once again. Religious symbolism and faith leadership could break through barriers that economic and political protest could not.
I was standing a few feet from Reverend Gillett and the circling parade when a port police officer approached me. I expected the usual threats and orders to leave. But instead, he simply had a message. He had spoken to Alaska management, he told me. They were OK with us circling the ticket counter one more time, but asked—pleaded—that we stop after that.
It was an extraordinary request. Just three months prior, we had been threatened with eviction from the airport. We had been stymied in our demand to meet with the Alaska CEO. With clergy in the lead, we had escalated actions, we had broken the rules at the airport and at Alaska’s headquarters. We now had the company’s attention, had begun to see tangible concessions offered to workers, and had beaten back the port’s rules and secured our right to organize and protest at the airport. And now, with clergy leading the tuneful parade, we found ourselves in the new and amusing position of being asked nicely by Alaska and the port to please give them a break.
We circled the ticket counter two more times, and then broke off for a spirited victory celebration.