In case you missed it, air travel this summer has been far more than a hot mess — summed up by the headlines about one airline flying one thousand-ish bags from London’s Heathrow to Detroit. Flights have too often become purgatory for many passengers, as well as airline employees, leading to one insufferable, long and hot summer.
We’ve heard a bevy of reasons, including a surge in demand from travelers after they spent two years sheltering in place, sickouts and technical meltdowns.
But according to the business and government watchdog Accountable.US, the commercial aviation industry has merely reaped what it has sowed over the past couple years. The group’s research concludes that management at the largest U.S. air carriers must shoulder much of the blame for this chaos. An ongoing mistreatment of employees, insists Accountable.US, has created an ongoing labor shortage after treating its workforce poorly with low wages, long hours and minimal benefits.
This cluster, otherwise known as the U.S. airline industry, has festered two years after companies accepted a total of approximately $54 billion that the federal government doled out to keep these companies afloat during the worst moment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of the deal the feds made with airlines was that employees would not be fired or furloughed through the fall of 2021.
The problem was that tens of thousands of airline employees were laid off after the terms of that bailout expired, and the rest is history. Airlines started reporting quarterly profits during 2021. Airlines forecast more profits going into 2022. Airlines expected a robust air travel season in 2022. But then, the airlines didn’t have the employees required to handle the massive nationwide cabin fever breaking out over the past several months, so airlines started to cancel flights. The resulting stories, of course, will live forever on TikTok and Instagram.
The airlines can counter that they didn’t lay off employees, but rather, they doled out “voluntary separations,” “early retirement packages” or simply couldn’t afford to keep the on their payrolls — literally the day after — once the federal CARES program ended.
As the news about air travel became worse during 2022, airlines have blamed the cancellation and delay of flights on bad weather and problems with air traffic control systems. The problem with that argument, however, is that the data suggested 40 percent of all air travel delays from January to April 2022 were because of circumstances under the airlines control, said Senators Edward J. Markey and Richard Blumenthal said last month in a public statement.
“If an airline cancels a flight for any reason, the airline must promptly provide passengers refunds, as required by the law,” the senators added. “As the July 4th holiday approaches, the reliability of the air travel system should not be up in the air.”
We know what has since occurred, as close to 29 percent of the flights on July 1 were either delayed or canceled.
Long before the air travel industry found itself in the midst of this summer’s turmoil, doubts had been raised about the effectiveness of federal government’s multibillion-dollar lifeline. By September 2021, the Washington Post and other media outlets reported that U.S. airlines had shed a total of approximately 56,000 workers, despite these companies’ pledge to not lay off employees.
“I think it’s right for taxpayers and Congress to ask, ‘What did you do with this money?’” John Breyault, vice president for public policy, telecommunications and fraud at the National Consumers League, told the Post’s Michael Laris and Lori Aratani last December. “The bailout money was specifically designed so that airlines would not have work shortages. While they didn’t lay off people, they did furlough many employees. There were many early-retirement packages. And now we’re seeing the results of that.”
Image credit: Clay Banks via Unsplash
