Where Have They Landed? Observations on U.S. Airline Labor Relations

Abstract

As a graduate student at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in the early 1980s, panning around for a thesis topic, I fortuitously set my sights on airline labor relations. In retrospect, it was an obvious choice. Herewas an important industry, chock-full of unions and undergoing fundamental changes with which collective bargaining had to deal. Nearly forty years outfrom deregulation, it is a good time to take stock of where airline labor  relations have currently “landed.”