(The Department of Justice has sued to block the merger.) Over the last two decades, the likes of Northwest Airlines, US Airways and Continental Airlines disappeared from jetways, absorbed within a homogeneous wave limited to a few major carriers.

Since 2001, nine airlines have disappeared - with a tenth possible in the coming months as JetBlue tries to acquire Spirit Airlines. Ultimately that led to the great consolidation of the airline industry. Travel didn’t rebound to August 2001 numbers until March 2004. September 2001 saw 33 percent fewer passengers than the month prior. In the months after the terrorist attack, air travel tanked. How Did We Get Here?Īfter 9/11, the airline industry suffered as America’s collective trauma made air travel much less appealing. “Workers are more cognizant of all the different work groups that make it possible for aviation to run,” continued Nelson.īehind it all is a key irony: The growing cannibalization of the business (which consequently has meant fewer options for consumers) has actually given workers more leverage in the biggest union drive in the airline industry in about half a century. Consumers’ non-union choices are limited - or nonexistent. Flights are staffed by members of a union. All baggage is handled by members of a union. In an airport, there’s often no other option. Think about it: Outside the confines of an airport, if baristas at Starbucks go on strike, consumers can go down the street to another coffee shop. The success of unions in the airline industry, and the sectors that support the airline industry, is in part because airports are a closed system. There’s solidarity,” Sara Nelson, International President Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO tells Talking Points Memo. “People are seeing workers who previously sort of were working in the dark. Employees at airports including Dallas/Fort Worth, New York JFK and LAX all went on strike at various points over the last year. Flight attendants, baggage handlers, and pilots are all fighting in tandem - a move that puts enhanced pressure on the airline industry. Nowhere is this clearer than in the airline industry. Led by unions, the fight has not been this robust in more than half a century. From Starbucks to Amazon, the American worker is taking on the powerful corporate players that are - more often than not - concerned more with the welfare of their stock tickers than the welfare of the workers manning their stockrooms. The growing labor movement in the United States is having a moment. In 2023, unions are at the vanguard of providing a check on a set of corporations that Americans are fed up with. A single point of failure can have widespread ripple effects.īoth of these factors have caught the attention of an increasingly powerful force in the airline industry: organized labor. Second, America’s air travel network is easily disrupted. There are two factors at play in these episodes, which both speak to how thin and precarious America’s system of air travel has become.įirst, consumers simply have fewer options available to them than they did a decade ago, and, as a result, airlines have considerably more power. However, no other major carrier experienced such a robust and widespread disruption. Southwest largely blamed a severe weather event for the meltdown.

The debacle led to thousands of canceled flights and left millions stranded in one of the busiest times for the industry. Southwest Airlines’ outdated systems failed to keep up with demand in late December during the key holiday season - a development which airline insiders had warned would happen for years if the Dallas-based budget carrier did not change its ways. A version of it unfolded on a massive scale only weeks before my attempt to reach Idaho. It was my personal encounter with a problem you may have experienced - that many Americans have experienced - especially, it would seem, in the last few months. I eventually made it to Idaho in the wee hours of the morning - more than 15 hours after I was supposed to. I was one of seventeen people that needed to make that connection, and ended up stuck in the Twin Cities. The next flight to Boise was a staggering ten hours later. Unfortunately - because of the delay - there was no way I could make my connection in Minnesota. Once the ground stop was lifted, my Delta flight left New York’s LaGuardia. Paul with a tight connection to Boise, Idaho. I had a flight that morning to Minneapolis–St. 11, a hack shut down the FAA’s systems, grounding all flights nationwide.

Southwest airlines points