January 03, 2005
Unfriendly Skies
I've watched the slow collapse of U.S. Airways with frustration over recent years. Coming from Vermont, where U.S. Airways has long been the dominant carrier out of Burlington, and generally being a child of the Northeast Corridor, where U.S. Airways' shuttles have made it easy to jet set up and down from Boston to Washington, most of my frequent flier miles are on the successor of the storied Piedmont Airlines. I think I was in high school before I realized that they weren't the largest carrier in the country, because by golly every time I flew somewhere it was on then-U.S. Air.
So I don't want to see U.S. Airways go under for personal or symbolic reasons, but boy oh boy did they make a mess out of Christmas. Ten thousand misplaced bags, hundreds of canceled flights, and, says the Washington Post, at least one bride-to-be who saw U.S. Airways lose her wedding dress. You can't come up with worse publicity than all that.
The dozens (hundreds?) of employees who participated in the seemingly organized sick-out violated an important rule: You just don't mess with Christmas. You get no sympathy from anyone for making a celebratory time into a living hell. And the once-proud unions now look ridiculous for saying that there was no organized labor action or sick-out. Yea right.
I'm normally a big union person—our firm works closely with the largest and fastest growing worker's organization in the country, and I remember how proud I was to stand with the Painters and SEIU's purple people during the Dean campaign. You will not find more honest, hard-working Americans anywhere. In that vein, I believe that workers badly need to organize and that our country needs strong, vibrant unions for so many reasons. In one of my favorite Molly Ivins quotes, she wrote:
Labor is not just about the union movement. It's about all American workers. Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give money out of the goodness of their hearts.
Unions are the backbone of the American economy, and I know that it must be frustrating for U.S. Airways' employees to give back so much in the way of good pay and benefits in the face of competition from non-union low-fare competitors. (Perhaps if the airline employees were organized a little more smartly, they'd have been able to negotiate better deals, but that's another story.) The way to compete against that is to show that your union employees can provide better customer service and make flying an enjoyable and easy experience. Don't cut off the nose to spite the face.
In the end, though, this effort by the unions has backfired and will likely drive U.S. Airways even deeper into the hole. For me, I think I'll go ahead and cash in my frequent flyer miles while there's still an airline around to fly me.
