AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

As we continue our roundtable on 9/11 health on this 25th anniversary week of the 9/11 attacks, we go now to Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, now serving her fourth term as president. She’s been a union flight attendant since she was hired by United Airlines in 1996, now representing 55,000 aviation first responders from 20 airlines.

Sara, welcome to Democracy Now! I want to know where you were on 9/11. At the time, you were a United flight attendant based in Boston, but you were in Chicago, where Juan is today, on that day. You had flown on United Flight 175 just the week before, the plane that hit the south tower of the World Trade Center?

SARA NELSON: Yes, I was serving as our local vice president in the union and also as our national strike chair, and I had just landed in Chicago to go to a union training. But so, I went to our national office, and we were getting the briefings from United. As we were getting all the flights on the ground, we were tracking where all the crews were going, and making sure that everyone was on the ground. We didn’t know how many more flights were in the air that could be affected.

As it turned out, I got the briefing partway through that morning that it had been Flight 175 that had hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. And, of course, if you haven’t been around and don’t follow the chronology of the events, that is the plane that you can see flying into the south tower, because every camera was trained on that site when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower 17 minutes earlier. So, there were already first responders on the way responding to the incident.

And I know the exact moment that my friends die. And I say their names every day: Amy, Michael, Amy, Kathryn, Al, Alicia, Marianne, Jesus and Robert. And Robert was a good friend. These are people that I flew with all the time. He relayed some of the first intelligence of that day from Flight 175 about what was going on. My handbook is in the 9/11 Memorial Museum, that gave us the exact wrong training for that day. We were told to keep everyone calm, appease the hijackers. And so, getting that information from those flights was critically important, because that got to the crew on Flight 93. And it was a crew of all women, five women. The pilots were killed immediately. They —

AMY GOODMAN: Flight 93 was the flight.

SARA NELSON: Flight 93 was the last flight to take off that day and that had the hijackers on board. And it was taken over. That flight was planned to hit the White House or the Capitol, very likely the Capitol. And the passengers and the crew found out what was going on, and they organized together to fight back. And I think that this is —

AMY GOODMAN: Five — the five flight attendants were all women.

SARA NELSON: They were all women. And the passengers — between the flight attendants and the passengers, there were white, Black, Asian, Latino passengers. There were Democrats, Republicans and independents. I think this is a really important point. But in that moment, they were just one. They were unified to be — to fight back, with urgency. And they did fight back to try to save their own lives, but definitely made it possible to save the U.S. Capitol and so many other lives on the ground. And I think that that is a really, really important point, that this is what we need right now: to fight with urgency to get people what they need.

We need Medicare for All. We need to be able to respond, because it is these for-profit systems that put people in a place of denying the realities of the problems that we face today. And so, in the aftermath, we were helping flight attendants. We lost 20% of aviation workers overnight, furloughed, gone, those jobs gone. We went through a series of bankruptcies. Eighty-one billion dollars was given back by workers in the wake of 9/11, including transferring the cost of healthcare to us, destroying retiree healthcare, destroying pensions. And we’re still trying to fight to get that back.

But when we say “never forget” — and I remember, in the weeks that followed, seeing that sign and thinking, “Who would ever forget this?” But people do. And if it were not for our unions, if it were not for the people on the ground, the grassroots organization, the people who were willing to tell the stories, we would not only forget, but that, to me, when I think about my friends, that is — that is the biggest betrayal to them. They were amazing people that we should certainly remember. But in their names, we need to make sure that people are safe today. We need to make sure that all of the problems that were created by this, and all of the people who took this as an opportunity to redefine the value of workers in that time, to lessen the value of workers and put more into the hands of Wall Street, that also is the story of 9/11.

And that also is what we continue to fight as a union, even today, trying to keep federal security from being privatized, trying to keep knives off the plane, trying to address the fact that we breathe toxic fumes on the planes, and no one will identify that. So, that is really, to me — this has become, obviously, my life’s work. But 9/11 is alive and well with me every single day, because “never forget” means also understanding that we have to define those problems, that we have to fix them, and that we have to stand together, just like those passengers and the crew did on Flight 93, with urgency, to fight the problems that we have today.