In case you missed it, air travel this summer has been more than a mess – summed up by the headlines about an airline sending a flight from London Heathrow to Detroit with around 1,000 lost bags and no passengers . Flights have too often become a purgatory for many travellers, as well as airline employees, resulting in an unbearable, long and hot summer.
We’ve heard a host of reasons, including an increase in demand from travelers after spending two years sheltering in place, as well as sick leave and technical meltdowns.
But according to business and government watchdog Accountable.US, the commercial aviation industry has only reaped what it has sown in recent years. The group’s research concludes that the management of the largest US air carriers must bear much of the blame for this chaos. The group links the airline industry’s persistent labor shortages to a legacy of mistreating its workforce with low wages, long hours and minimal benefits.
This US airline industry cluster has spread two years after the federal government doled out about $54 billion to keep airline companies afloat during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of the agreement the federal government reached with the airlines provided that employees would not be laid off or laid off until the fall of 2021.
Then tens of thousands of airline workers were laid off immediately after bailout terms expired, and the rest is history. Airlines have started reporting growing quarterly profits in 2021 and forecast stronger growth through 2022. They were expecting a robust air travel season in 2022. But now airlines don’t have the employees needed to handle the massive nationwide cabin fever that has erupted over the past. several months, so they started canceling flights. The resulting stories, of course, will live forever on TikTok and Instagram.
Some airlines counter that they didn’t lay off employees, but instead handed out “voluntary separations” and “early retirement packages” to workers they couldn’t afford to keep on their payroll — the day after the bailout deal ended.
As travel news worsened in 2022, airlines blamed flight cancellations and delays on bad weather and problems with air traffic control systems. The problem with this argument, however, is that data suggests that 40% of all air travel delays from January to April 2022 were due to circumstances within the control of airlines, Sens. Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal, members of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, wrote last month in a series of open letters to major US airlines.
“If an airline cancels a flight for any reason, it must promptly refund passengers, as required by law,” the senators wrote. “As the July 4 holiday approaches, the reliability of the air transportation system should not be on hold.”
We know what’s happened since, as nearly 29% of domestic and international flights in the United States were delayed or canceled over the July 4 weekend.
Long before the airline industry found itself in the middle of this summer’s turmoil, doubts had been cast about the effectiveness of the federal government’s multi-billion dollar lifeline. In September 2021, the Washington Post and other media reported that US airlines had laid off around 56,000 workers, despite pledging not to lay off employees.
“I think it’s fair for taxpayers and Congress to ask, ‘What did you do with that money? December. “The bailout money was specifically designed so that the airlines would not have a shortage of work. Although they did not lay off people, they laid off many employees. early retirement and now we see the results.
Image Credit: Clay Banks via Unsplash
