Union Leaders Clashing Over Huge Airline Merger

Union leaders of two airlines are at odds as to whether a proposed merger of their companies would be good for employees.

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Check out more from the MR crew:

Matt Binder DOOMED

Brandon Sutton THE DISCOURSE

Emma Vigeland ESVN

Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING

Tell us about the problems that we see with Monopoly and labor. Because we're seeing this in the context of freight trains. We see it in other areas. I mean and we see this conflict in other places like even the Willow project which is this ConocoPhillips sort of like massive or oil drilling Venture up in Alaska and the North Slope that the Biden Administration seems to be sort of like trying to negotiate to offer you know I don't know part of it to Conoco. There's also labor bouncing up against the environmental movement in some respects. we're even seeing indigenous folk you know wanting the jobs. Like that tension of more jobs versus just about anything else that exists with unions in particular. I mean in other cohorts as well. but talk about how this is sort of like coming to a head in certain areas. Well, I wrote about earlier this week when it seemed like Sarah Nelson was potentially a candidate for the Labor Department job before Biden announced this week that Joey Sue would get it. There's this interesting situation about a merger between JetBlue and Spirit. a proposed merger. These are two of the low-cost carriers that provide a little bit of competition with the major airlines. four of which control about 80 of the routes. And they're looking to merge and you know we've seen close to a dozen mergers in the airline space in the last 15 years. None of them have been good for workers on aggregate. They reduce the number of bidders for the services of flight attendants and groundworkers and everything. and yet Sarah Nelson who is the head of the association of flight attendants and represents the Spirit Airlines flight attendants came out in favor of the merger. And said we're going to get all of these perks, we're going to get pay increases, we're going to get certain guarantees in terms of our work and things like that. There's this dilemma that labor has when they're dealing with mergers like this. and sometimes you see it go one way and sometimes you see it go the other. In that, the labor movement itself is fairly weak in the United States and so if they do what's probably best for the overall labor movement which seeks to have these mergers blocked, that doesn't do anything for their individual circumstances which are in intention. so they try to get them to use it's rare when labor has leverage to use. and so when they get it they try to use it. And in this case, we'll give you support for this merger if you give us better pay, better conditions, better work hours, and things like that.