Against the Wind - National Air Traffic Controllers Association

108
Against the Wind
Susan Tsui Grundmann (right): When
NATCA’s current general counsel joined
the union’s staff in 1990, she recalls that
“we were like a small family.” / NATCA archives
Cheryl Cannon (far right): She has
handled the union’s growing switchboard
while watching the national office staff
triple in the past decade. / Peter Cutts
1988
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degree from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New
York, after the strike and practiced with a private firm
specializing in aviation law until he joined NATCA in
1989. He would serve as
the union’s general
counsel for a decade.
Susan Tsui, a graduate
of the Georgetown
University
Law Center, came
to the union in December
1990 from
the Sheet Metal
Workers National
Benefit Fund.
Early in 1991,
NATCA hired a part-time
receptionist named Cheryl Cannon. She eventually
switched to full time and remains the first NATCA
employee that most visitors see when they walk
into headquarters. The growing staff also included
NATCA’s first director of safety and technology. Joel
Hicks, who’d worked at TRACONs in New York, Chicago
and Oakland, California, had been one of the
activists involved in organizing NATCA during the
mid-1980s.
Since then, NATCA’s national office staff has
tripled in response to the evolving needs of the union.
Where Tony Dresden once grappled single-handedly
June Aug.
The FAA commissions the twentieth Host computer system at
Salt Lake Center.
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with the monthly newslet- t e r
and media inquiries,
C om mu n ic a t ion s
Director Courtney
Portner and three
other people handle
that work and
much more now.
Richard Gordon,
the union’s first director
of labor relations,
enjoyed the help
of an assistant. But with
the mushrooming growth in
bargaining units, the Labor Relations Department has
swelled to nine people, plus a full-time liaison, under
the direction of Bob Taylor. (Gordon left NATCA
in 1996 to start a consulting firm, working with the
FAA, The MITRE Corporation, and other clients.)
Like Humphreys, Tsui has grown up with the
union personally and professionally. She married
Karl Grundmann in 1994 and was promoted to general
counsel in 2000. Tsui Grundmann recalls that in
those early days “we were like a small family.” E-mail
and the Web were not in the public realm yet and
few committees existed. As a result, members in need
often turned to headquarters, where the phones rang
almost nonstop.
“You had to do it all. It was exhausting,” she
President Steve Bell announces the establishment of a ten-member
contract negotiation team for the union.