From Al Jazeera; I am writing this from London’s Heathrow Airport, in the midst of a uniquely hellish day of travel – a flight canceled without warning, getting rebooked on another flight with no time to make my connection and, finally, after conversations with three different airlines, a solution that inexplicably involves flying to a fourth country.
I’m paying for this mayhem not just through the cost of my ticket, but with my taxes: American Airlines has been the beneficiary of over $12 billion in government bailouts and loans over the past two years. The money, which totaled $50 billion across the industry, was intended to keep airline employees in their jobs. But the companies, of course, figured out how to get around this – 42,000 full-time and 14,000 part-time airline workers had left by the end of September as a result of widespread furloughing and early retirement offers. The 75,000 jobs that airlines claimed to have saved came at a taxpayer cost of about $300,000 each. Obviously, nobody should lose their job as a result of the pandemic or their company’s awful business practices (airlines routinely buy back stock to drive prices up while keeping very little money on hand for emergencies). But the notion that airlines simply can’t be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they treat customers or employees, is BS. Bailing out these multibillion-dollar companies without any strings attached is not only terrible for consumers and for the environment (no net-zero emissions requirements?), it’s also massively unpopular. Even The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, normally a booster for big business, described the practice by saying, “Once again, we have socialized an industry’s losses and privatized its profits.” The only people who benefit from airline bailouts are stockholders and, specifically, CEOs. Airline stocks are up 200 percent since last year, and thanks to that, American Airlines CEO Doug Parker took home $11 million in 2020. With flights routinely canceled and customer service somehow becoming even more atrocious than it was before the pandemic, the government is now beginning to wonder what the airlines have been doing with all that money. On Wednesday, the CEOs of major airlines are being called to testify before Congress. Let’s hope our elected officials will finally hold them accountable for taking us on the wrong kind of ride. — Jessica Loudis Roland. Toronto.
