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Comment by tasubotadas | Hacker News Reader

>The company will take the money but the state won't get a say: this is a concise summary of what Lufthansa's Executive Board, headed by CEO Carsten Spohr, has been telling German politicians in the past few weeks.

That's awesome.

Create a crappy business, hire 130k employees, and get the state to pay for your failures.

At this point, I would be happier that they would just give the money to Google and Facebook which proved that they know a thing or two on creating value and sustainable business.

Obviously, airlines that have been doing fine (Ryanair, Wizzair?), won't get a dime which seems completely absurd. I did some quick googling and apparently Ryanair has similar opinion: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-24/ryanair-s...

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Ryanair isn't 'doing fine', it's trying to force customers to accept vouchers instead of the cash refunds it is legally obliged to provide.

And the idea that Google and Facebook could do a good job of maintaining the profitability of an airline whilst being obliged to pay the capital costs of aircraft it's banned from flying is the epitome of Silicon Valley arrogance. Let's be honest, Google and Facebook haven't even adapted their core competency of connecting people digitally well to this crisis - otherwise there's no way people would be grudgingly using Zoom instead...

Can confirm, they have £1k of my money, which they've held on to for over a month already, and are refusing to refund. It looks like it will be several months at best before they refund it. I plan to do a chargeback in the meantime.

I get that Ryanair are in financial difficulties, but they can't expect their customers to bail them out, and are behaving unlawfully - I'm damn sure I wouldn't get away with it, so neither should they.

It's not only Ryanair - Air France are doing the same.

Air France also want the profits from KLM which actually runs well compared to AF. I wouldn’t mind if they split up again.

How is it a crappy business? It literally took countries shutting down their borders and people not traveling at all to bring them to their knees.

If an average person were laid off today and couldn't find a job for 1-2 months, would they go bankrupt? I think most people would be able to survive on their savings for a month or two. Companies should also be held to the same standard. They should have enough savings to survive this sort of disruption, just like a person would.

So yeah, if your company can't survive a month without revenue, it is a crappier than average business.

> I think most people would be able to survive on their savings for a month or two.

I think that is optimistic...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/most-americans-dont-have-the...

They wouldn't go bankrupt, but surviving would require taking on debt.

Simple comparisons of companies to people is a world we long since left behind and are not really valid or useful except in very general rough senses.

That is a gross oversimplification. They are a huge multinational, even if they had saved their entire net income of over a billion euros it would not have been enough.

So unemployment insurance for people shouldn't exist?

Isn’t the German government taking a stake in the company again, as a state holding? They can sell that to recoup the investment later on. Letting it fail seems like it would drop GDP / tax revenue while pushing thousands onto social welfare.

It will be a net positive deal for sure. Germany can currently borrow money for free (they have negative interest) and invest when the shares of the company are super low.

Plus all the welfare stuff mentioned.

> Create a crappy business, hire 130k employees, and get the state to pay for your failures.

Uh ...

You'd rather Germany sink 10 billion Euros into an American company with barely any German jobs? Over 60k of those 130k are in Germany. If your plan is to cripple the economy, then yeah, absolutely, let all these companies fail and put all these people out of work for a situation that is in no way their fault and there's no feasible way for them to have prepared for such a drastic fall in revenue (for reference, their 2019 revenue was 36 billion Euros with a net income of 2bn).

Also, the value of Google and Facebook to society and the economy can seriously be questioned. They don't even pay taxes in Germany. They have zero benefit to the German economy.

Or let these companies fail and free up the air routes across Europe and create a more efficient company? I do not think that we need to keep bailing out airlines at all. Lufthansa has so many issues, starting with their website, internal problems (try to get an invoice from them), etc. Why do we (the taxpayers) have to pay for their failures of these airlines?

how long does it take to build an efficient airline?

why do you think it won't be a net positive for the tax payer? it's literally the government buying low and selling high when this is over.

Look at the Asian airlines. Many of them were built recently. My personal favorite is Air Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirAsia

Not long, when a massive airline recently went bankrupt and you can purchase their assets at fire sale prices and hire their now-jobless employees.

If you purchase their assets and hire their jobless employees wouldn’t you still have the same inefficient airline?

Presumable you could choose different routes and a different organizational structure

One thing that needs consideration is that the state will be taking care of these employees either way.

Either they pay Lufthansa or they pay for the unemployment insurance.

I normally do not like listening to the "blunt talking" Michael O'Leary but there's something extremely refreshing about an airline CEO stating bluntly that airlines should NOT be given bailouts by governments. The way he sticks to to Richard Branson (billionaire living in a tax shelter asking the UK government to bail-out one of his ventures) is particularly satisfying. It's just after 3:45 into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtccxnEmfeM

The have a blocking minority controlled by a single entity. Why bordering with a seat in a board. And they appoint the board sear they got. Will be some consultant or state near industrialist. There are plenty of them.

If it was employing 130k for long time then perhaps it's not a crappy business.

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