Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the group that represented Charlene Carter, says she wants to go back to work.
"She loved her job as a flight attendant, and one of the remedies in the case is that she be reestablished as an employee of Southwest Airlines," Mix details.
He tells AFN the legal process in this case was neither quick nor easy, but rather "a five-year legal odyssey" for Carter.
"She is a strong Christian woman who has opposition to abortion and a strong pro-life position," the attorney explains. "When she found out that her union was using money that she had to pay as a condition of keeping her job … to support an agenda that was contrary to hers, that had nothing to do with the workplace, she decided to stand up and fight."
Carter resigned her Transportation Workers Union of America (TWU) Local 556 membership in 2013, but the union -- because of its exclusive bargaining privileges over the condition of her employment -- continued to be Carter's "voice" when it came to these issues of workplace and job conditions.
In 2017, Carter learned that the union and its president, Audrey Stone, attended the Women's March in Washington, D.C., which received some funding from Planned Parenthood. The flight attendant criticized the union's attendance on social media.
"The union stepped outside of its lane and got intimately involved in an issue that is ideologically and certainly religious for Charlene. And when she objected, they went to Southwest Airlines, and they demanded that the airline fire her for her 'behavior,'" Mix relays.
The jury of her peers in Texas has decided that it was a retaliation suit on behalf of the union, and they rewarded Carter over $5 million in damages. Fox Business reports that TWU Local 556 plans to appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
