A little over one month ago, Federal District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask mandate that required people to wear masks at airports and other transportation “hubs.” (Mizelle is a hack who had virtually no experience in her job before getting jammed through the Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell Federalist Society court packing process.) Delta Air Lines jumped on the news and quickly announced that they would no longer require customers or crew members to wear masks.
Five weeks later, how’s that going? CNN is reporting that on Thursday, Delta Air Lines announced that it will be cutting around 100 flights a day from its summer schedule. You know, one of those times in the year when people a lot of travel. Why would they do this? They’re doing it to "minimize disruptions and bounce back faster when challenges occur." Huh. Delta explained, “This will build additional resilience in our system and improve operational reliability for our customers and employees.” Oh, “improve” and “additional resilience,” sounds good. It’s all still so vague, though.
Chief Customer Experience Officer Allison Ausband released a statement saying: “More than any time in our history, the various factors currently impacting our operation – weather and air traffic control, vendor staffing, increased COVID case rates contributing to higher-than-planned unscheduled absences in some work groups – are resulting in an operation that isn’t consistently up to the standards Delta has set for the industry in recent years.” Oh. COVID-19. Your optional mask policy has greatly impacted the health of your workforce? Who, besides my grade-school-aged children, could have predicted that?
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In Delta’s defense, they also cite “inclement weather” as a thing that’s been tough on their business model. Also in Delta’s defense they were receiving a lot of political pressure from people like Cancun escapee enthusiast Sen. Ted Cruz to continue allowing bad actors with terrible public health habits to stay on flights. These issues, coupled with mounting losses for airlines like Delta as COVID-19 has continued to hurt the numbers of travelers and crew available to the make money off of, pushed Delta CEO Ed Bastian to openly promote the myth in March that the pandemic was over—psychologically speaking.
“People have decided to start traveling again,” he said. “And in the last three weeks the governments of the world have decided it’s time to go, that the Covid era is over. We’re moving into a period where we’re managing this virus, rather than being managed by it.”
Sadly, corporations are corporations, and if we know anything about the rich and wealthy among us, it’s that the only thing they are smart about is making money by rigging a system. The fact of the matter is that the airline industry, like many thinly built businesses in the modern era, was in trouble the moment COVID-19 hit. Billions in bailout money were piled onto an industry that spent all of its Republican tax giveaways on buy backs and corporate bonuses. In fact, just before getting that Trump bailout money, many major airlines—including Delta—had spent upwards of 96% of their “free cash” over the previous decade buying back their own stock in order to keep the finance shell game going.
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As a reminder, long before COVID-19—about four years before—the brilliant corporate leadership was losing a lot more money just being themselves. “Bastian said he remains skeptical about the benefits of fuel-price hedging after Delta dropped the activity in 2016 following losses that totaled $4 billion in the previous eight years as it sought to guard against hikes.”
Now consumers and workers will suffer again as a result of corporate mismanagement. Corporate players will in turn throw up their hands and say, “What could have been done?” while also reminding their shareholders about how they were able to increase dividends and profits quarterly by using taxpayer money bailouts. And if that gets to a breaking point, our government has shown its willingness to bail out the useless leaders of industries in order to keep them in mega yachts.