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Abstract
The political economy of aviation has been historically volatile. This instability continues today and there is reason to believe that this is the permanent economic condition of aviation. It is in this environment that airline pilots and flight attendant unions began and continue to work today. Because pilots and flight attendants are based all over the country, often not living in their assigned domicile, their unions are not spatially embedded in the way in which other unions typically are. While pilots and flight attendants have certainly both profited and gained in some ways from this lack of spatial embeddedness, they are nevertheless embedded in a seniority system that is quite peculiar to the industry. They have essentially exchanged spatial embeddedness for a type of temporal embeddedness in the form of a seniority system. A national airline union with a single seniority list would help protect unions from the instability of the aviation industry.