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Re: Flight Attendants' role in success of smoking ban

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to the research paper, “Clearing the airways: advocacy and regulation for smoke-free airlines” by Holm and Davis, published in the March supplement of Tobacco Control, 2004. While Holm and Davis present an apparently comprehensive narrative of the events that lead to the legislative prohibition of smoking in aircraft cabins, one is left with the sense from their research of “historical documents, journal and popular press articles, the world wide web and some tobacco industry documents” that the successful passage of the legislation was due to clever political maneuvering and the actions of “health advocates”. I would like to suggest that the flight attendants themselves, as individuals and members of unions, played a more central role in the passage of the legislation than was represented by the paper. In fact, the flight attendants were the critical element in getting congressional action.

Prior efforts to pass federal legislation on smoke-free worksites had not found Congress a friendly environment for such bills. One would therefore question why health advocates had failed to get federal legislation for smoke-free worksites but were successful in the airlines case? What was so different about the airline smoking ban case? Holm and Davis did not answer this question, nor did they bring any insight into the relationship between the tobacco industry and unions, key players in this battle. Rather, the paper simply painted a picture of flight attendants and the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) as “scenery”, presenting personal testimonies of their ailments due to years of exposure to tobacco smoke. Union involvement in the issue is absent from the discussion and conclusions of this paper. Yet the presence and participation of the AFA was critical because with the unquestionable hazards to flight attendants on board, the issue was successfully reframed as one of “worker health and safety”, rather than the industry’s approach of “smokers’ rights” and accommodation.

The AFA has had a long history of concern over air quality in aircraft cabins. The AFA reasoned that advocating for smoking bans was an avenue to bring forth flight attendant health and safety concerns, since they feared that “without the intervention of Congress, the National Academy of Sciences study [on Cabin Air Quality] will end up on one of the (FAA’s) burners that is so far back you cannot even tell if it is on.”(1)

The authors of this paper attribute the defeat of the tobacco industry to (i) the industry’s limited leverage over the CAB and FAA, (ii) their inability to mobilize on a grassroots level and (iii) the lack of scientific basis to support their position. Absent from Holm and Davis’ discussion is the key role that the AFA played in thwarting industry efforts to win allies within organized labor. Industry documents reveal years of strategizing to woo organized labor and in the airlines case, the AFA and the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA). The industry had actually underestimated the power of the flight attendants as they were duly warned in 1993 in light of smoking bans in bars and restaurants that “an anti- smoking position developed by HERE (Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union), similar to that adopted by the Association of Flight Attendants could present a major setback. However, HERE as an ally in this effort, would be a very powerful voice.”(2)

Holm and Davis conclude that the “single-issue focus” in advocacy work should be a lesson for future health advocacy work. The ownership of this success is debatable and, perhaps a more important “lesson” to reflect upon is how a single-issue focus in this instance has helped to create an alliance between health advocates and unions, while this has not always been the case. Perhaps a more valuable lesson is that unions are key players in tobacco policies in the workplace and that health advocates must consider how this coalition may be strengthened in future battles over workplaces such as restaurants and bars.

Charles Levenstein, Ph.D., M.Sc. Professor Emeritus of Work Environment Policy; and Co-Director, Organized Labor and Tobacco Control Network University of Massachusetts Lowell Lowell, MA

References

1. Achenbaugh N, Finucane M. FAA Should Create An Office To Address Crewmember And Passenger Health. R.J. Reynolds. September 19, 1986. Access Date: October 23, 2002. Bates No.:506294126/4131. URL: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/hje71d00.