“Tired of the Apologies”: Southwest Airlines Workers & Flyers
Excerpts from DemocracyNow
The U.S. Department of Transportation says it will investigate cancellations and delays by Southwest Airlines after the airline canceled about two-thirds of its flights since a Christmas snowstorm. The unprecedented operational meltdown left thousands of travelers stranded, causing scenes of chaos at airports across the country during one of the busiest travel seasons in the year. Corliss King, vice president of TWU Local 556 representing Southwest flight attendants, says the union has warned the company for years about the technical issues that contributed to this week’s chaos.
We also speak with Paul Hudson of FlyersRights, the largest nonprofit airline passenger rights organization in the U.S., who blames decades of cost-cutting and chasing profits for the deteriorating service in the airline industry. “It’s more profitable to have bad service than good service,” says Hudson.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to bring in Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights. Paul, the airline industry in America, ever since Jimmy Carter deregulated it, from the passenger’s point of view, has just gotten worse and worse and worse. Every plane is full. Whenever there is any kind of a weather emergency, there are all kinds of problems with cancellations. What do you see is the main problem? Is it that these airlines have no capacity to deal with crisis?
PAUL HUDSON: Well, they have no capacity because it’s actually more profitable to have bad service than good service. Every airline is required to have a plan to deal with bad weather and other disruptions, but there’s no enforcement of the plan. There are no reserve requirements. There are no customer service standards of any meaningful nature. The whole idea of deregulation was that the airlines would compete to provide better service. But actually what happens today, they compete to provide more profitable but worse service.
And there’s a whole list of reasons why this has happened. The main one, I think, is that we don’t have good leadership at the federal level. The airline industry is the only one that I know of that has only one regulator, the federal DOT. And they have really dropped the ball for many years.
Specifically Southwest, their computer system has been obsolete for years, and that’s been known. But the federal government hasn’t taken any action. Computer systems today are not a frill; they’re a necessity. And when they go down, there needs to be a fail-safe backup. Apparently, what happened this week is that there was no backup, and the manual rescheduling of flights is totally inadequate.
