On Travel

"Good help ain't cheap, and cheap help ain't good."
     -Anonymous

     The subjects I will broach have well documented and written about for years, by a variety of experts, economists, scientists, journalists, and writers and occasionally theologians. What I hope to do is to examine the issues that we collectively face, at the end of an age, from the perspective of a layman, an average Joe, a working stiff.

     I am a regular working guy. I make my living off one of the most fossil fuel intensive industries under the sun, the airline business. Crude oil is the life blood of this business. Jet fuel is now the largest expense airlines have, outstripping even labor (including health care). Now, every major legacy carrier has gone bankrupt, resorting to Chapter 11 to abrogate their labor agreements and toss workers and their pay, pensions, and health insurance out the window. Every function that can be subcontracted, has been. Catering, aircraft cleaning, maintenance, passenger check-in, baggage handling and ramp service and even flying. All these functions are now performed by third party vendors, wherever possible.

     As a side note, when pension obligations are discharged under Chapter 11, the responsibility for paying pension claims, generally at fifty cents to the dollar, falls to the PBGC. (Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation) Think of it as the FDIC of pensions. That means, dear reader, that this responsibility falls to you, as a taxpayer. Meanwhile the airline execs walk away with golden parachutes, receiving Wall Street accolades for their "turnaround". Yet one more example for socialism for the 1% and capitalism for the 99%. Ain't neo-liberal economics great? Of course the PBGC is grossly underfunded and is effectively insolvent. Perhaps Paul Ryan can come up with a voucher program for that too?

     Even the epidemic of airline bankruptcy has not been enough to staunch the bleeding. And so the subcontracting has ratcheted up. Short haul routes that were once flown by the majors in 737 aircraft are now bid out to the regional airlines for 90, 70, or even 50-seat RJ service, yet the fares only increase (note the recent $10 one-way fare increase on short haul routes). Enter the era of nickel and dime-ing and self-service. Want to check a bag? $25.00 please. Want a seat with legroom suitable for someone over five feet tall?, That'll be $69 please. Even Tyrion Lannister would be cramped and uncomfortable in seat 32B. Show up to the airport a little early and want to get a head start? That'll be $75 please. How would you like to pay for that today?

     Just as getting a person on the phone is an increasingly rare experience, so is actually interacting with a human being during the booking of your reservation, or check-in. Humans are expensive and electrons are cheap, for now. Most customers have been blithely trained to do their own work. Tickets are purchased via an el-cheapo website (replete with fine print restrictions even an experienced lawyer can't sort out.) When you arrive at the airport, you insert your credit card into a kiosk, or ARD (agent replacement device) as we call it, and out spit your boarding passes, after you navigate a dizzying series of menus, hawking various "travel options" in an effort to separate you from your money. The truly savvy techno-travelers get a bar code sent directly to their smart phone and breeze through security without ever having to mess with the unwashed masses at the ticket counters.

     Still, this is just not enough. So the airlines merge. There is simply not enough revenue available for them all. Contraction is the order of the day. When I started in the business over twenty years ago, there were many air carriers. The original Frontier, Eastern, Western, Ozark, Aloha, Western Pacific, Northwest, America West, and TWA and many more have either gone belly-up or been swallowed by competitors. The latest was the marriage between Continental and United. Now US Airways is making noise about merging with American, after they finally succumbed to to pressures of operating with livable wages in a high oil environment and filed chapter 11.

     Another side note, I remember when US Airways emerged from Chapter 11 and merged with America West. Their CEO said "US Airways is well positioned to be profitable in an environment with oil priced at $60 per barrel", or something very close to that. I paraphrase. Last time I looked, Brent crude was $113/bbl.

     It is easy to peg this as all the fault of the "greedy unions" but that would be wrong. Keep in mind that when my friend George went through an airline bankruptcy in the early 90's, and mainline service was replaced with regional service at his location, he went from $36,000.00/yr as a ticket counter agent (hardly a 1% living) to $8.00/hr. DGS (Delta Global Services) one of the major ground-handling providers is starting their new-hires at $7.50/hr. -part time- in 2012! This is the magic of the market, right? The invisible hand at work. Unfortunately the Adam Smith's hand is crushing the workers into debt-peonage. At $7.50/hr., they are far less likely to finance a car, buy a home, or go shopping (consume) which is where 70% of our GDP is birthed. And so the economy languishes. Meanwhile, instead of professional service at an airport, what we get is akin to a trip to the local burger shack during lunch rush. Airlines have even had to relax their tattoo and piercing policies to accommodate the new caliber of ramp-workers.
　
     I actually do not arrive at this juncture from a place of covetousness or envy. This is just the way is is. This is what a corporation must do to remain competitive in the 21st century. As Wendel Berry put it: "A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance." This pile of money has only one purpose, to become an even bigger pile of money, by whatever means necessary. This is the process of "biggering" that Dr. Seuss wrote so eloquently about the "The Lorax."
So what do we do? Unfortunately, most citizens would see this as an issue to be "fixed" by "policy". Provide grants or stimulus. Cut taxes, relax regulations. Perhaps drill, baby, drill. Build a pipeline direct to the tar-sands. That's great shit up there in Alberta ain't it? Let's raze the entire Canadian boreal forest and poison the watershed of a whole province so we can fly to LAS for $59.00, one-way. Let's put the world's largest freshwater aquifer at risk, while we're at it. And that doesn't even raise the specter of runaway greenhouse, a real risk at this point, by all accounts.
     And therein lies the crux of the problem. We cannot see the forest for the trees. We see individual issues within the Global Industrial Economy as problems to be fixed, rather than seeing the economy for what it is, a man-made complex adaptive system that exists as a subset within the biosphere. And like any organism, the Global Industrial Economy depends on abundant nutrients and ample waste sinks. Unfortunately the larder is getting bare and the septic tank is backing up into the yard. We know this. Meals on Wheels ain't gonna show up and the Divine Septic Service is otherwise occupied.

     So once again, what are we to do? We can plant a garden and put in a composting toilet, or we can sit back and watch the horse race. More on the looming Trifecta next time.