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