Delta anti-union poster: Spend on video games over union dues | Hacker News Reader

Delta anti-union poster: Spend on video games over union dues

washingtonpost.com

87 pointszdw92 comments

Give me a break, some people are pro union, companies are not. pro union folks campaign to get folks to join, companies campaign to stop that. Delta didn't say anything along the line of if you join you will loose your job or some subtle threat. They said spending $700 on video game sounds more fun than union dues. I personally think it's funny. If anyone is going to be swayed by that, then that person probably shouldn't join a union or can just as easily be swayed by a union with something silly and more catchy than Delta's campaign.

People shouldn't be swayed by that, and in my opinion, Delta shouldn't put it out there, either. Delta is in a much stronger position than most of its employees.

The fact Delta makes an appeal on that level is disappointing to me.

There's a common sentiment that fools should be taken as such. I don't subscribe to it, for the most part. I think that's brutish business.

Not that it excuses Delta's terrible behavior but other companies also put out anti-union propaganda [1] [2] [3] and it's also terrible behavior.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/how-wal...

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2018/09/27/amazons-...

3: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/target-anti...

Comments like this make me wonder what the economic philosophies of the average HN commenter is. I see a lot of things that seem pretty pro-capitalist, neo-liberal, etcetera. But I've always viewed the bulk of who's visiting and viewing to be mostly working, middle, or upper middle class. There's remarkably few people who benefit from the no-union position (even if Delta's messaging was legal). Of course your company is going to protect its own interests, but I'm surprised how frequently I see pro-employer comments at the top, rather than pro-worker.

Personally, I dis-like Delta's messaging because it equates one of the last vestiges we have of worker's rights -- the union -- to a video game console. It's absolutely insulting to the worker, to suggest the people that work for you are dumb enough to believe that argument. It's fine for the employer to have an opinion on unions, but this is tasteless.

A lot of people on HN are entrepreneurial, and have started their own businesses or have worked at a small one and understand the perspective of management. I do not want employees, no matter how low level, to view their employers antagonistically. Unions foster a sense of antagonism and inflexibility, which makes hard but necessary decisions more difficult. Ultimately it will kill the business, which helps no one.

--> "I do not want employees, no matter how low level, to view their employers antagonistically"

The problem is, at its core, the employer-employee relationship is a type of exploitation. Exploitation of any kind generally does not come without antagonism.

If you find it exploitative, try living without an employer, hustling for every customer. You'll learn how much of a service employers provide by providing a steady paycheck just for showing up.

Do unions practically matter to entrepreneurs? You'd might be better served worrying about whether your business will crash and burn (as most do in the first N years).

Once you have a thousand people, then really think of the implications of unions. To have a dozen people and worrying about your totally-gonna-happen-exponential-growth and the consequential unionization seems like a short-sighted use of limited hours you have in ensuring your startup's success.

I’m saying you get an appreciation for management. You can steal the golden goose’s eggs for only so long, which is part of the reason why Delta acquired the unionized company in the first place - it was weak.

IMHO the "average HN commenter" is more likely to not just straightforwardly share in the popular consensus. One doesn't have to be anti-union to write the comment you're responding to - aggressively pro-union with an attitude of "let them try, we'll do it in spite of them" gets to the same place, even if it's a bit naive.

It is definitely Orwellian to be continually subjected to messages directly contrary to your self-interest/well-being. But unfortunately this is the same setup we see across all of wider society - whenever someone stands to make a buck through some psychological failing of yours, they buy advertising to induce that. Philosophically, why would union membership be any different?

Politically, spaces full of techies have traditionally been an uneasy truce between progressivism (as you'd expect from high-income, high-education white-collar professionals) and libertarianism (from the entrepreneurial and anti-authoritarian segment of the population), with both sides represented in roughly equal numbers. About 80% of the time, these two sides see eye-to-eye, so places like HN can seem more monolithic in opinion than they actually are.

It's the generally condescending tone of the posters that people are reacting to most strongly, I would imagine.

You're implying that unions and companies have equal power over the employees, when this is pretty obviously not the case.

Selling out a citizen's responsibility to engage in government in exchange for a bit of cash has a sordid history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine

Makes a lot of sense. I don't understand why you're being downvoted.

> Crosses One Line Too Far in Union Busting

With posters giving their point of view? I was expecting to read about them calling in strike breakers with baseball bats, given that headline. Surely posting literature that isn’t untruthful, offensive, abusive etc is always ok and should be protected even if you don’t agree with the argument?

An example of the poster can be found here:

https://twitter.com/EoinHiggins_/status/1126477710434414592/...

A lot of people are finding it offensive.

Lame? Sure. Offensive? No.

"Offensive" shouldn't be a synonym for "something I don't like".

I would say its insulting to their intelligence at the very least. If I had an extra sum of money the last thing on my mind would be games. Its insulting and demeaning to assume such. Why not assume that extra money would be going to medical bills, housing, etc.

> that extra money would be going to medical bills, housing, e

Because they assume that you are smart, and the $700 is after those bills.

If you're working for an airline you're probably not rolling in dough. They don't typically all make what people in software make, so it's not a given that all those bills are paid in the first place.

> If I had an extra sum of money the last thing on my mind would be games

Bully for you.

'Repulsive' is perhaps the better choice here.

That is a much more appropriate word.

Maybe consider "offensive" under its "aggressive" definition. It's a plainly worded discouragement from participating in unionization.

I don't see any aggression. What is "aggressive" about pointing out that for the cost of paying a union boss to negotiate for you, you could buy a video game system instead?

Maybe more to the point, what's wrong with a company discouraging employees from participating in a union? It's against the company's interests. They have a right to try to persuade their employees with posters, just as the union has a right to promote their position with their own propaganda.

Oh wow, who would ever infer that there might be consequences for doing something the company you work for hates so much they bothered making flyers against?

Nobody in their right mind would think that's the first of many, many hints for people that can't catch the drift.

Frankly it's none of their business, just as the company shouldn't lobby their employees on who to vote for.

> It's against the company's interests.

The fact that it's a baseline assumption that a company's interests is opposed to the interests of the employees who create the company's value is exactly why employees and their unions need political protection.

It's definitely the company's business, since unions add another layer of management to their business processes. And these days it's generally assumed that a union is opposed to the company's interests because unions by definition are there to extract money from both the company and its employees.

Unions are nonprofit, they don't exist to "extract money" from anybody. They exist to act on the behalf of all their members in negotiations, to increase wages and to provide employment-related services like labor lawyers in case of a wrongful firing. In the airline industry, Union workers make on average $12k more than non-union workers, which more than makes up for the $700 dues.

>I don't see any aggression.

You're taking it too literally. I'm distinguishing the definitions of "offensive" between the "smells bad" kind and the "attacking" kind.

And how is that offensive? They don't want their employees to unionize. Are they not allowed to express that opinion?

Thou dost protest too much.

In human interaction, it is often the case that specific exhortations not to do something with only concessions explaining why it's so great for the non-exhorting party tends to be interpreted as the exhorter having something to gain by doing so.

In a mutually beneficial contract like employment, if someone specifically went out of their way to tell me not to unionize, that's the first sign a Union might be a damn good idea. Given that as time goes on, and unions fade further and further from the limelight as youngsters take over who have never had much union interaction except through stories from grandparents, it strikes me as disingenuous to acknowledge the company's right to post backhanded smears of the right of labor to organize without tempering it with a bit of perspective.

The fact this campaign puts off such slimy vibes (I've seen less slimy cigarette ads, and that's saying something) entitles Delta to be treated with whatever scorn and loss of goodwill this move generates.

Free country and all, right?

> In human interaction, it is often the case that specific exhortations not to do something with only concessions explaining why it's so great for the non-exhorting party tends to be interpreted as the exhorter having something to gain by doing so.

So what?

> In a mutually beneficial contract like employment, if someone specifically went out of their way to tell me not to unionize, that's the first sign a Union might be a damn good idea. Given that as time goes on, and unions fade further and further from the limelight as youngsters take over who have never had much union interaction except through stories from grandparents, it strikes me as disingenuous to acknowledge the company's right to post backhanded smears of the right of labor to organize without tempering it with a bit of perspective.

What perspective is that, exactly? There's no smear here. They're stating their view.

> The fact this campaign puts off such slimy vibes (I've seen less slimy cigarette ads, and that's saying something) entitles Delta to be treated with whatever scorn and loss of goodwill this move generates.

All you've done here is re-assert your negative emotional valence. Not given any sort of explanation for it.

>So what?

So people should consider the source, and what said source would prefer you not do with 700 dollars a year. There is something they have to gain by doing it, why else invest the man hours in the propaganda? Therefore, prudence cautions that one should look into whether or not this so called union may be a net positive thing to contribute to.

>What perspective is that, exactly? There's no smear here. They're stating their view.

No, they aren't. A statement of their actual view would be "Work with us! Cut out the middle man! Don't make it difficult for us to work with you by bothering with one of those fangled Unions (who can actually fact check us, and wield enough leverage where we might actually have to take you seriously). It's much easier on us to sweep your complaints under the rug, or make decisions effecting you if we don't have to deal with a collective bargaining unit!"

Let's be honest, Delta gives not a care about the worker's entertainment habit. The message is clearly "don't unionize". Which is a fundamental right of the labor force. It's like a company looking you in the face and saying "You don't need that free speech, freedom of assembly, right to be free of religion based discrimination, and right to due process or civil redress anyway. Just leave those all at the door."

While many will contend the Bill of Rights only covers the government; in general, operating in such a way that civil rights are violated openly merely because you are a private entity tends to be a newsworthy event, and invites scandal, protest, and worker discontent; which makes unionization all the more likely of an eventual outcome.

The perspective that must be tacked on, is that laborer's have as much a right to organize themselves to deal with their employers (who have entire departments dedicated to making sure they can get the most work for the lowest price, and put up a substantial legal defense of it if neceossary). This has been necessary before, and may very well be again.

>All you've done here is re-assert your negative emotional valence. Not given any sort of explanation for it.

I asserted it's a free country, and just as the employee is free to not unionize if things seem to be going well enough, the company is free to run poor taste campaigns against labor organization which really accomplish nothing but making people realize that maybe a Union would be a good idea, and that you're telegraphing to your customer base (who may include Union members in other industrial verticals) just what your stance on worker's rights are. This means you are also free to suffer the consequences of said customer's getting miffed, and taking their business elsewhere on principle.

Seems a bit odd to have to spell it out, but I appreciate your point, even if I do think you may need to pay a bit more attention to the forces at play in the world around you if you've not experienced any of the above yet.

You're moving the goalpost - "it's offensive" vs. "it's allowed"

Ok, so again, why is it "offensive".

I don't work there, so I don't find it personally offensive, but I do find it condescending, patronizing, manipulative, greedy, self-contradictory, crazymaking, presumptuous, insulting, tone-deaf, laughable, short-sighted and self-defeating. It makes me want to harm that company. I want them to be hostile-taken-over and reorganized. (I'm not infuriated or anything. It just takes very little to get on my shitlist. They should count their lucky stars that I'm not dictator.)

Maybe those workers (who have more power to harm the company than I do, and whose place it is to be personally offended) should commit as much and as costly sabotage as they can creatively think of, and hide it behind feigned incompetence (maybe blaming it on sleep deprivation from a video-game addiction), until everyone in the company realizes that the destinies of everyone in the company are all bound together. What happened to that good old team spirit guys? If management wanted to demonstrate to the workers that a union is needed for dealing with them, and that dealing with them honestly as members of "one big team" will prove laughably impossible, they couldn't have picked a better way to advertise it. (That's what I mean by self-defeating above.)

That's just my opinion that I'm freely expressing!

>What's truly offensive, and downright nefarious here,...

From context I don't think that definition works.

What's truly aggressive and evil vs What's truly unpleasant and evil. I think the second works better.

Either way it was an offensive attack on the union which this person found offensive and nefarious.

I think if your union can't hold up to a simple attack like this then you have no business unionizing. The union poster should read something like, our union got you an extra $1 an hour. That's about $2,080 a year. In which case your dues are well worth it.

> The union poster should read something like, our union got you an extra $1 an hour. That's about $2,080 a year. In which case your dues are well worth it.

Great idea... as long as the union did actually manage to achieve something as concrete as that. If not then maybe the Delta poster has a point.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/offensive

"causing displeasure or resentment"

It's the internet, people find everything offensive these days.

And people find complaining about how people find everything so offensive these days somehow edgy, your point?

Perhaps their meant it as 'in poor taste' or the like.

This is long past edgy, it'd be unoriginal if a comedian said it. It's pretty much a standard part of our culture now thanks to social media. Much like the concept of slacktivism which is closely related (when the bar drops so low for being an 'activist' for something, then everything has activists).

Edgy was perhaps the wrong word, but 'keeping it real', while being blind to their own echo chamber being guilty of the same, (taking offense, looking for safe spaces, accusations of bigotry...).

What someone finds offensive is entirely subjective.

My comment was an answer to

> Surely posting literature that isn’t untruthful, -->offensive<--, abusive etc

Well, more thoroughly stated, it's one line too far, for him to continue to fly Delta. Maybe a bit dramatic as headlines go, especially since he can react only to things he actually hears about. (They may have crossed his "line" long ago, but it didn't make it onto Twitter etc.)

I'm not up to speed on what's "protected" anymore; people seem to care more about being protected from speech nowadays rather than protecting the speech itself. So I'm setting all that aside.

But the poster that seems to have started the shitstorm (https://twitter.com/EoinHiggins_/status/1126477710434414592) is indeed untruthful. They're concealing their true and real argument/position/reason for why they don't want a union (namely that they'll have to transfer wealth to workers) and using a disingenuous one (namely that they want you to have a game system).

Incidentally, one of the reasons it fails is because, as one of the many replies to that tweet said, it's trying to bribe you with your own money.

I think the poster’s argument is the the Delta union does not deliver $700 of value to its members, so spend the money on something you value more instead. I don’t know if that’s true as I don’t know their numbers but it seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable, adult, honest opinion to present to people.

Speaking of honest, now nobody knows WTF I'm talking about because you swapped-in a different article link.

> you swapped-in a different article link

I did? I don’t run HN and I didn’t post the original link and have no power to have changed someone else’s submission! I didn’t do it and I’m not dishonest.

My mistake, I didn't go far enough up the tree. Sorry about that.

I'm pretty pro union myself. However, I think it makes sense for people to NEED the union. If they don't need it they shouldn't join it. Defaulting into something is how you get stagnation. You should think about whether or not $700 would be better than the union.

If you get rid of the Union and then your pay goes to shit, then Unionize again and demand higher pay. We should make Unions as fluid as possible so that not only companies but unions feel the pressure of their membership numbers.

EDIT: Yes, I know this ignores the startup cost of forming a union and the pressure by companies to form unions. But I think that points out a flaw in our current legal system not a deficit in my (overly) optimistic idea of how easy it should be to form and end a union.

My goal is competition in unions, not to start and stop them every time they lose favor. Starting and stopping them may not be realistic ever, but it'd be nice if we had options.

You're ignoring the huge transaction costs (and employer criminal behavior) involved in starting up a union. You are right that unions need accountability to their members, but dissolving the union is not the way. We don't dismantle the national government every time the government solves a problem.

Very good point, I'm not saying I want to dismantle all unions and create them again. But I would like more competition with unions, currently there isn't much of that.

Well I might have said that in my comment but it wasn't my intent and reading your comment made that more clear to me.

I don't buy this. There's significantly more work involved in organizing a new union vs. improving an existing one. For one thing, the channels of communication in a non-unionized workforce simply do not exist. Companies like Amazon have specific guidelines for identifying organizing behavior, including gathering employee contact information, and they take action accordingly. Under your strategy, you shouldn't start a union until it's too late to start a union.

I think that's a problem with the law not with the process.

Some unions are awesome and have done great things, others have really slowed down innovation and made working harder for the people they represent.

>Companies like Amazon have specific guidelines for identifying organizing behavior, including gathering employee contact information, and they take action accordingly.

That should be illegal. And so should being forced to join a union against your will (which the teachers unions can do).

>Under your strategy, you shouldn't start a union until it's too late to start a union.

Then how do we have unions in the first place? They were started because of the need for them, but I don't see the back pressure on unions. Maybe we need to give workers freedom to pick which union they want to be part of but I see things as broken in two parts right now. Unions have tremendous staying power, which hurts them in the long run. And it's hard to form a union. I think both things should be fixed.

The problem with Unions is that by definition, they never have as much oomph at the table as the employer, since their war chest is a function of what the employer is already paying.

In a great touch of irony, this means that the most exploited workers are frequently those who have the most trouble parting with income to support forming a Union.

However, it just so happens that by instituting one, the Union can become itself more equal in what it can run down and discover about the company itself, creating a more equal entity sitting across from the corporate lawyers on the other side of the table.

What everyone wants is for company and employee alike to just play fair. When only one of you has the financials on your side however...

Well that quickly goes out the window.

All in all, I think Unions should make a bigger comeback during times when the labor force is getting shafted.

Is that time now? I'm not sure. Haven't checked their financials.

Looks like the union negotiated a 30% raise for pilots so, that's a few Xboxes for the pilots. I don't think this ad will be effective.

But I see your other points and they're all good. I don't know if the law of unintended consequences would mean union competition became a race to the bottom or a race to the top. But I think some unions are not as effective as others, and I don't know why that is.

I mean, the answer's not all that complicated: Unions are made up of people, and different people have different levels of ability.

Some unions elect people to lead them who are corrupt, and want to simply hoard the power for themselves and those closest to them.

Some unions elect people to lead them who are incompetent, and no matter how hard they try, they can't achieve the union's goals.

And some unions elect people to lead them who have both the desire and the ability to genuinely achieve the union's goals, and make things better for the workers without crippling the business(es) they work for.

Looking at long-standing unions, the problem is multiplied further by entrenched attitudes, cultures, and even rules that differentiate them, built up over more than a century. Some of these will likely increase effectiveness, while others will hamper it.

All of this is, incidentally, a big part of why most anti-union rhetoric is so frustrating to me: it paints all unions as being one thing (and a bad thing at that), when it's painfully obvious that there is no fundamental requirement for unions to, for instance, make sure that terrible employees are un-fireable. It's just something that's built up in some of the old, crusty ones.

You don't sound very pro-union You're ignoring the risks and difficulty in forming unions in the US, and, even if we accept that there are people who don't "need" unions, unions should be formed when they're least needed because that's when employees have the most power.

I'm not sure what happened but this website versus two years ago is filled with shills. Posting on twitter that your employees should buy an Xbox instead of join the union is fucked up

> Posting on twitter that your employees should buy an Xbox instead of join the union is fucked up

Did they post it on Twitter? I’m not sure that’s what happened in this story.

But anyway the argument they’re making is ‘your union is not worth $700 to you so spend that on something that is instead’ I don’t know if that’s true but it’s a reasonable and plausible argument.

If your union can be dismantled by an obviously sad attempt to discredit it like this poster then you have no business being unionized.

All they need is one poster saying, "We got you a $1 per hour raise, that's about $2,100 a year. Go buy 3 Gaming systems on us." Game Over.

This isn't offensive, it's weak, transparent, and lame.

Flagged for changing the link from

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/05/10/delta-union-busting.htm...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/10/delta-tol...

circa 5pm Fri 5/10/19.

PSA to all confused readers reading comments posted before that time.

Moderators, if this isn't against policy, it ought to be.

As the person who posted the original article then going to the front page later and seeing some other story and title replacing the one I linked was pretty strange.

Odd indeed!

Delta is the only big American airline, that I know of, that doesn't own any Boeing 737 Max aircraft.

I don't know when these planes will go into the air again but I assume they will. Based on the reporting of the problem with Boeing and these planes I don't feel like I want to fly in that plane and I don't want to play ticket games to try and avoid a particular type of plane.

I know lots of people have good reasons for being angry at Delta, but for me just the fact that they don't have this particular plane and thus I'd never have to worry about ending up on one of them makes me likely to continue using Delta. Is this irrational of me?

Irrational? Not at all. Delta can be reasonably well priced and you're avoiding a known risk that hopefully is fixed. If you're paying substantially more for Delta to avoid that plane while also not having the income to support that luxury it might then be irrational.

The naivete of people in situations like this drives me nuts. This person discovered that a company they frequent has done something that offends their sensibilities. Now they going to Do Something About It! And we should all join them! This aggression cannot stand!

This is arbitrary offense-taking. I'm not taking a stand on whether or not Delta has done something egregious. I don't care about the underlying issue. What I can't stand is people who become aware of something like this and act like they've uncovered a crime against humanity that we're all ignoring.

I guarantee that the author wrote that blog post while wearing clothes manufactured in a sweatshop, on an electronic device manufactured in many sweatshops, with a stomach full of food picked by disadvantaged illegal immigrants, after driving home from work in a vehicle powered by oil from an unsavory country. They're proud of the million miles they've flown, with a carbon footprint that's big enough to sink a continent.

To be fair, the author acknowledges much of this in the post, which makes it all the more inane. This one company crossed some arbitrary ethical line in the sand, and the author wants everyone else to jump on board.

The world is a messy place full of suffering and wrongness. By all means, pick the occasional battle and take a stand once in a while, if that's your thing. I'll find something better to get bent out of shape about.

I go to great lengths to buy clothes not made in sweatshops, actually. I admit I have some clothes probably made in sweatshops that I go second-hand. BTW, I've often been the only one at FOSS conferences raising the issue that t-shirts given out and/or sold were made by sweatshop labor.

Yes, the X200 I'm typing this on was probably made in a sweatshop, as was the Nexus One I still use as a mobile device. But, I use every piece of hardware I have until it breaks in an unfixable way, and I also only buy used hardware. I've purchased a newly made electronic device since the late 1990s.

As I mentioned in the original post, I've only worked for charities dedicated to causes I support. I'm curious to know which causes you spend your time getting "bent out of shape" to work on. Perhaps making up facts about authors of posts that get HN coverage is your cause? Is that your day job, or just a hobby cause? :)

Oh, and as for commuting, I work from home, which means I don't drive home from work any day. The last day I "drove home from work" was circa early 1997. Did you happen to research and were speaking about the commuting I did in the 1990s?

I wonder how the rest of HN readers cash in on this "guarantee" you gave them about the facts of my life which I can easily disprove you were wrong about.

And now the link to the article I was commenting on has been swapped out and replaced with a Washington Post article. I don't know who did that, but it completely removes the context.

Very true, we should never criticize anything bad because we can't criticize everything bad. We do live in a society after all.

I realize sarcasm is the "way of expressing things on HN", and I did some of it myself in a post upthread, but to get serious on norgie's point for a moment: I picked this specific issue to speak out on for two reasons: (a) as a regular traveler [0] and speaker at FOSS events, this was a great opportunity to draw attention to the problems with airlines, as all of us use them to attend these events and my blog is well read among FOSS folks and (b) as someone who is a frequent traveler, and recognized by Delta as a "good customer", I have a louder voice then most in this debate.

There are indeed a lot of issues that we should be speaking up on, and it can be exhausting to speak up on all of them. I try to target moments when my voice can get a bit more attention than usual for some reason and pounce on the opportunity to make a difference. I think it's a good approach.

(Again, I'm the poster of the ebb.org blog post that was the original article linked to in this thread; as others have mentioned, this article was changed to be about the Washington Post news story that inspired my blog post).

[0] and yes, the fossil fuel impact of that does bother me and I've spoken about that too at FOSS conferences)

Did you skip over the bit where he mentioned his experience as a CEO whose workforce unionized during his tenure?

Someday unions will be back. Until then, keep listening to what your Sinclair station tells you.

Url changed from http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/05/10/delta-union-busting.htm..., which points to this.

Wherever you stand in the union issue, you have to take exception with the dishonest reporting about Delta’s profitability. Airlines are enjoying profits recently because of low fuel prices over the last five years. But nobody mentions that Delta went through bankruptcy in 2007. Airlines aren’t a long-term profitable business that can support inflexible union arrangements. A spike in fuel prices can quickly put them in the red.

> Wherever you stand in the union issue, you have to take exception with the dishonest reporting about Delta’s profitability. Airlines are enjoying profits recently because of low fuel prices over the last five years. But nobody mentions that Delta went through bankruptcy in 2007. Airlines aren’t a long-term profitable business that can support inflexible union arrangements. A spike in fuel prices can quickly put them in the red.

Airlines don't hedge against increases in fuel price by engaging in futures markets? That sounds borderline irresponsible of management.

That's another way to quickly go into the red. You purchase futures contracts to hold your fuel prices steady, then the market turns and fuel gets really cheap. Your competitors can now start a fare war and you're locked into expensive fuel while they enjoy cheap fuel.

When you make a bet on the future price of a commodity, that bet may work well for you (see Southwest during the late 2000s [1]). But it just as easily can hurt you if the prices move the other way.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/business/worldbusiness/28...

They probably do hedge but hedging also costs money and at some point becomes uneconomical due to lack of time machines and so on.

I'm pretty sure airlines do hedge against increases. But that only delays things if prices go up permanently.

Won't something think of the poor mega-corps!

Corporations large and small are mostly owned by the upper middle class, not the ultra rich. Given that people generally move up through income levels over the course of their life, this includes a pretty large fraction of Americans, although probably not a majority. Hurting mega-corps, in general, will mostly hurt the old and decently well off, not just the rarefied ultra rich.

You mean the ones that employ these people who want to unionize?

Yeah, we should all eat whatever they feel like giving us like helpless dogs. It's not like we are necessary for the operation of their business or anything.

> 2007

12 years ago.

> A spike in fuel prices can quickly put them in the red.

I have a hard time believing these claims when I read that their CEO got ~13M in compensation last year [1].

But even if it is: if they are so on the verge of destruction, they may as well treat their employees with decency. After all, they might as well disappear next year.

https://www1.salary.com/Edward-H-Bastian-Salary-Bonus-Stock-...

Honestly, I'd rather fly with an airline where the mechanics aren't unionized.

I don't want someone to have a poor team attitude and not care about what they're doing because they know they can't get fired for less than 3 infractions or whatever else the union negotiates.

I want underperforming mechanics out ASAP and the best ones rewarded.

> I want underperforming mechanics out ASAP and the best ones rewarded.

That would be nice. I think it's more likely that it would be the mechanics that don't make waves and keep costs down who would be rewarded. Woe betide the mechanic who insists on delaying a flight and costing the airline large amounts of money to investigate a possible issue that might result in a 0.01% chance of a crash, rather than delaying it to a more convenient time.

Sure, that would be nice. Maybe I'm just not familiar with unions, but what are some examples of high performing / high quality companies with a unionized workforce?

My only experience is friends who have worked in unions and their stories make it sound like there's little to no chance for advancement besides waiting in line, so at best people skate by and do the bare minimum and at worst actively try to subvert management decisions.

Plumbers, electricians, lots of other sole proprietor workforces in the trades have unions that institute strong training and protection for their union work. Is it perfect, nope. I can't stand police unions in my state because they prevent perfectly reasonable road crews from functioning with only flag crews instead of with flag crews and a usually sleeping officer just to pad their wages. There's some crappy things about unions but it's the only effective way to protect individuals from companies. They don't however protect companies from outsourcing, usually to lower paid non union workers of lower quality.

Well I want people who are thinking about the problem they have in front of them, not about whether they can afford taking Sally to the doctor to have that weird lump on her shoulder checked.

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