While the industry’s top executives and investors are richly rewarded for slashing costs and boosting their bottom lines, workers and passengers alike are driven beyond the breaking point. Rather than provide enough flights, seats or leg room for passengers, or hire enough employees and provide them with sufficient rest time, wages and benefits, airline executives are driven by what is called “capacity discipline” to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the existing numbers of workers and aging and over-extended airplanes and equipment. The airline, known as an Ultra-Low Cost Carrier (ULCC)-which regularly rates on the bottom for customer satisfaction-wants passengers to blame workers for conditions which are produced by relentless cost-cutting and the anarchy of the capitalist free market. Spirit’s executives were fully aware they had a pilot shortage before Monday night and did nothing to warn passengers. The airline’s supposed concern for its passengers is entirely hollow. ALPA officials, who first denied any slowdown was taking place, quickly capitulated promising to comply with the order. On Tuesday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the union from any “concerted refusal to perform normal pilot operations consistent with the status quo” until a further hearing. It also charges that pilots not scheduled for duty have also snubbed “junior assignments,” which are offered to lower seniority pilots at higher pay rates.īy allegedly making concerted efforts to refuse last-minute shifts, Spirit’s lawsuit stated, the pilots were violating the Railway Labor Act, an anti-worker federal law used to effectively block strikes by airline and railway workers. The lawsuit charged that pilots were refusing to take assignments during the “open time” left on their monthly work schedules to fill in for other pilots who get sick or cannot make a trip. Hours before Monday evening’s angry eruption, Spirit filed a lawsuit in US district court against the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) alleging that it was “engaged in a pervasive illegal work slowdown that has caused approximately 300 flight cancellations and has disrupted the travel plans of over 20,000 customers, while causing Spirit to incur approximately $8.5 million in lost revenue and irreparable harm to its goodwill with its customers.” These pilots have put their quest for a new contract ahead of getting customers to their destinations and the safety of their fellow Spirit Team Members.” In a statement, company spokesman Paul Berry claimed to be “shocked and saddened” by what had happened but then immediately declared, “This is a result of unlawful labor activity by some Spirit pilots designed to disrupt Spirit operations for our customers, by canceling multiple flights across our network. Spirit Airlines executives immediately blamed the Florida incident on the airlines’ pilots. Since then there have been a spate of other high profile incidents, including an altercation between passengers and an American Airlines flight attendant who took a stroller away from a mother with two small children and the expulsion of a Wisconsin man from a Delta flight because he had to use the bathroom. David Dao who was dragged from an over-booked United Airlines flight by airport police in Chicago. The melee in Florida follows last month’s brutal assault, also captured on cellphone videos, of 69-year-old Dr. Three travelers awaiting flights to New York were charged with inciting a riot, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and trespassing, according to police. Videos that soon went viral showed Broward County sheriff’s deputies forcefully handcuffing and arresting passengers. Several passengers, including those who had waited in line for hours or had been taken off a plane due to a canceled flight, got into angry confrontations with Spirit employees. In one of the latest widely publicized incidents concerning a US airline, passengers erupted in rage at a Spirit Airlines ticket counter Monday evening after flight cancellations and delays left hundreds stranded at Florida’s Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
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