The Unfriendly Skies

We at the Blasphemy Blog don’t know about you, but we would prefer it if airplane pilots kept their pensions. When we put our lives in someone else’s hands, we want that person to be someone with a stake in the future, preferably a good stake. Unfortunately, these days it seems like employees of airlines in the United States are just about the most oppressed and depressed workers out there, next to those poor souls toiling at Wal-Mart. Yesterday, United Airlines revealed to the world that it is going to try to get out of its current financial funk by not paying its workers’ pensions. The government is going to pay some, but not all, of the money.

Now, United Airlines and most of the other major carriers have had a rough few years. We understand that. But the truth of the matter is that the people in charge of these corporations have been stealing money from their own workers. Really. Stealing.

How do they do this? Well, it’s nothing more than accounting fraud, like Enron. The companies just overstate what they think their profits are going to be, and earmark those profits to go into the pension fund. Then, when the profits fail to materialize, they just shrug and say, “Hey, what can you do? We had a bad year.”

You’d think the unions would be able to stop this, by pointing out that the whole point of a pension is that it’s guaranteed money for workers to count on, and threatening to strike if the pension is not guaranteed. You’d think. But unions are weak these days. We’re not quite at the point where Andrew Carnegie can just lock his factory and go on vacation, leaving his striking workers to stew in their grievances, but we’re getting there.

Oh, and incidentally, the court that is allowing United Airlines to do this is a United States Bankruptcy Court. This would be the Court that is now harder for regular people to enter, thanks to the reforms recently enacted by Congress. So, if any of these airline pilots have been counting on their pension money to pay for some surgery they’ve been putting off, and paying for it out of other funds drives them into dire financial straits, it’s going to be harder for them to declare bankruptcy. But to the airlines, the Courts say, "Go ahead. Make the taxpayers pay the pensions. It'll be less money, but what's a few billion dollars between friends?"

All we’re saying is, we’d rather be flying with happier pilots than those guys.