Pete Buttigieg’s Plan to End Air Travel Armageddon: Force Airlines to Hire Workers
Perhaps it would have helped if the Biden administration didn’t force airlines to fire workers who didn’t follow its vaccine mandate.
I am so old that I remember the Biden administration vaccine mandates for companies with over 100 employees, potentially leading to travel disruptions for at least one airline late last year.
The disruptions continue, describing the situation as “travel Armageddon weekend.”
Travel issues continued piling up for fliers on Sunday as weekend flight delays and cancellations topped 10,000 — a tumultuous weekend for holiday travel blamed on staffing shortages, packed planes and the ripple effects from previous bad weather.
On Sunday alone, more than 4,200 U.S. flights were delayed and nearly 900 were canceled, as of 7 p.m. ET, according to FlightAware, which tracks flights in real time.
The Sunday flight problems continue a slew of weekend cancellations and delays throughout the country. Since Thursday, roughly over 19,000 flights have been canceled or delayed.
“This has been another travel Armageddon weekend,” James Ferrara, co-founder and president of global host travel agency InteleTravel, told USA TODAY. “But it’s not isolated, or really a surprise.”
To solve this problem, Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took a break from paternity leave to propose a solution after being inconvenienced.
Instead of forcing companies to fire workers, the federal government may force airlines to hire workers.
The federal government could take action against U.S. airlines on behalf of customers, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Saturday.
Many Americans have endured delays, cancelations, and other travel complications during the coronavirus pandemic, and in recent months, after many pandemic-related travel restrictions were lifted.
Following Buttigieg’s own flight being canceled, forcing him to drive from Washington to New York, he said his department has authority to enforce action against airlines that do not sufficiently maintain consumer-protection standards, potentially requiring them to hire more staff.
Buttigieg is also instructing the airlines how to operate, in addition to threatening enforcement action.
Buttigieg said he is pushing the airlines to stress-test their summer schedules to ensure they can operate all their planned flights with the employees they have, and to add customer-service workers. That could put pressure on airlines to make additional cuts in their summer schedules.
Buttigieg said his department could take enforcement actions against airlines that fail to live up to consumer-protection standards. But first, he said, he wants to see whether there are major flight disruptions over the July Fourth holiday weekend and the rest of the summer.
Enforcement actions can results in fines, although they tend to be small. Air Canada agreed to pay a $2 million fine last year over slow refunds.
Americans are less than impressed by this idea, and see potential problems with the plan.
Yup! This is the only time you’ll hear from Buttigieg when his life got inconvenienced. What about the Americans that pays your salary, what about their inconvenience not important⁉️https://t.co/1cuembxrUY
— Miranda (@andacar) June 19, 2022
How will he FORCE airlines hire more workers?
What next?
*Force oil companies to pump faster
*Force car companies to sell electric cars half price
*Force power companies to make cheaper elec
*Force the sun to make more solar power
KING BUTTIGIEG?https://t.co/OmDNs1Iryg— Tony Moore (@BoompsNC) June 19, 2022
https://twitter.com/SonofAmerican1/status/1538511170306510852?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Are there any members of the Biden administration who aren’t hapless whiners and don’t think their agencies aren’t simply there to serve personal needs? I have yet to identify one.
Buttigieg is just more hapless and whinier than most.
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Can the Biden administration just stop acting like the incompetent and evil bad guys from Atlas Shrugged.
I don’t think they are capable of it, honestly.
Petulant punk!
I meant PB, not you.
It’s not an act. It’s the real thing.
They’re not acting.
These people are so useless.
Politely wish to disagree. Hood ornaments are useless, except as ornaments. These people are worse than useless….they are impediments, they clog up space and keep people who are useful from getting work done.
I’ve been around since the Truman years, and remember as far back as Ike. I cannot, in my memory, come up with any administration that has been as consistent in stupidty, incompetence, or mean-spiritedness as this one.
People like Buttigieg make one appreciate Transportation Secretary Claybrook, or Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. At leas those two provided amusement value.
Most (all?) of the people in this administration would have been considered mentally
ill in the 50’s and 60’s.
“We have to have someone in Transportation”, they said.
“Give it to the diversity hire”, they answered. “There’s no harm he can do there. It’s such an unimportant office, no one ever even knows who it is anyway,” they said, chuckling at their own cleverness.
“How true.” chuckled Buttigieg. “I took 545 days of paternal leave before anyone knew I was missing.”
Cool. I always wanted to be an airline pilot. OJT?
OJT? Why bother with training? Where’s the adventure in that? Up in the air, Junior Birdman!
Send in those boxtops!
Or look in a Cracker Jack box for your piloting license!
Hey it worked in Airplane! Just add your inflatable co-pilot and you’re ready to go!
Surely you can’t be serious.
Don’t call me Serious.
Or Shirley.
Should we call you XM?
We are still paying and will be paying for a long time the check we allowed Fauci and the public health community to write during covid mania.
Shut down the economy and completely disrupt the supply chain? Sure, don’t worry about the truck drivers idled who left the industry. Vax mandates which cause early retirement or displaced workers in critical fields like healthcare, pilots, aircraft maintenance? Sure why not. Why is my flight delayed again and why hasn’t my stuff been delivered? That’s why Karen, because you pitched an unholy fit about masks, Vax and social distancing due to your narcissism and hypochondria and enabled the totalitarians during covid mania. The effects can’t be reversed or even mitigated overnight. You broke it so live with it. The rest of us certainly have to even though we told you what would happen.
“Perhaps it would have helped if the Biden administration didn’t force airlines to fire workers who didn’t follow its vaccine mandate.”
Remember when we used to joke that the Democrat mantra was that everything not mandatory is forbidden?
Now the’ve progressed to: everything not mandatory is mandatory.
Or, everything not forbidden is mandatory, which is logically the same as the old joke, but does seem to add some additional oomph to it.
“Are there any members of the Biden administration who aren’t hapless whiners?”
No. They are all hapless whiners from the big boy at the top all the way down to the white house dog.
So as with Twitter, the airlines now have to choose whether they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders or the ESG stakeholders. This is unconstitutional, it effectively negates shareholder rights. The government is telling management how to spend the shareholder money in a way that is so detrimental to the health of the business that it will eventually destroy it.
This is exactly why government destroys everything it touches. They just don’t know how to manage anything. When government spends more money that it steals from taxpayers, it can cover its losses by printing money. Airlines can’t so they will go out of business. Hello Venezuela!
They mandate the hobbling of your horse then mandate that it must run *this* fast. That it’s impossible to comply with both mandates at once is a fact of reality that does not bother them. They mandate it and thus it must be so.
Yes. EPA mandates don’t produce more than X tons of CO2. FERC mandates don’t allow the grid to go down burn coal. Both of them can fine you for failure to comply.
It’s a great day to be an American!
No problem. They can’t repeal the law of gravity but they can have their favorite alphabet soup federal agencies simply redefine the law of gravity, adding several important exceptions and qualifications. That way aircraft will be able to fly using less fuel.
The “red diaper baby” doesn’t fall far from the tree. Look up Bootygig’s old man sometime.
Just so you all understand this is not an exaggeration:
In 2018, the National Shooting Sports Foundation provided proof in a lawsuit (NSSF. v. California) that the state’s new “dual placement microstamping” requirement was “practically and legally impossible because no semiautomatic pistol could be designed and equipped as required by the 2007 law; microstamping the required characters on any part of a semiautomatic pistol other than the firing pin wasn’t possible.” They pointed to an existing provision of California law, Civil Code section 3531, which states “[t]he law never requires impossibilities.”
The California Supreme Court instead ruled that impossibility “did not authorize a court to go beyond interpreting the statute and simply invalidate it altogether;” and that “Neither the text nor the purpose of the Act contemplates that a showing of impossibility can excuse compliance with the statutory requirement once the statute goes into effect.”
Another masterful end-run around your constitutional rights, and certainly not the last.
Hey if a court can make a bee into a fish so why would other impossible things be a problem.
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
And it is now being reported that the Senate now has exactly enough Republican votes to pass their Gun Grabbing proposal.
https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2022/06/20/exclusive-mark-w-smith-republicans-raise-the-white-flag-on-red-flag-gun-confiscation-laws/
It’s like I’ve said for as long as I can remember, we could elect 100 Republican senators and they would still find a way to lose to the Democrats by one vote. Why NOW!!!! God do we need Trump back.
Why? Trump is endorsing RINO’s like Oz now. Trump’s agenda isn’t the same as ours
What was the alternative? The supposedly good conserative woman was an Obama supporter, iirc. Oz seemed to be the best candidate all things considered, he’s even gone against the medical establishment on some things which is rare these days. And he’s electable.
Trump wanted red flag laws. Sad!
@artichoke
No, Trump did not and does not support Red Flag laws.
At best that is a media induced severely out-of-context quote; at worst a lie out of whole cloth.
Trump did say he supported “Red Flag” laws WITH DUE PROCESS ( even conservative sites and gun sites jumped all on this as Trump was supporting Red Flag laws)
Pay attention to everything he said and in context with what was going on. (And he did support banning bump stocks which I vigorously disagreed with even though I personally don’t like them)
Trump wanted a set of medically sound alerts to mental issues to catch a potential shooter “at the earliest stage” ( paraphrasing Trump’s numerous statements) and a judicial test ( not just an affidavit) fair to the rights ( people often gloss over this part that was in the speeches also)
The left media distorts Trump’s words enough- we don’t need to help them.
If there is a legitimate issue with something Trump says or does fine (I have a few myself) but don’t take media generated often repeated falsities as fact ( which is what they are designed to do)
Don’t buy the lie- verify the things first. ( then if you still don’t like it, fine- you can be confident you are on solid factual ground and not standing on a false talking point)
What does “due process” mean in this context? Maybe it means that there’s a hearing. When is that hearing? He told us, when he said he’d support taking the guns first, then having hearings.
Fair question and here’s the honest answer ( based on an agglomeration of information from legitimate first and second hand accounts but stating I personally have not asked the man what he meant)
“Due Process’ in the way Trump talks ( remembering he is a total civilian and does not speak in “legalese” and has a more “normal” way of looking at things) means basically this:
There has to be a threshold of “probable cause” ( impossible to really define) that strongly suggests the individual has more than ability to commit the act but less than a stated intent ( a legally grey area)
That could justify an immediate intervention (taking away the gun in the heat of a moment)- laws and tests for situations like this exist, are routine and have been used for decades and SCOTUS has ruled in favor of them in very narrow circumstances.
Trump has been very consistent in this way of doing things.
Remember, Trump speaks his “mind” (often could have been phrased better) and the media is ever vigilant to spin and twist his words to what they want you to BELIEVE he said and meant rather than what he actually said and meant.
Now, after that ( the cooling off) would be the official hearing where there needs to be a true “show cause”. That too is routine and customary in other circumstances and has been for a long time.
Of course the moron I voted for – Bill Cassidy – is in favor. Got another 4 years of this idiot before we get rid of him.
I doubt you had better choices.
Well, no, the government does not have the power to force airlines to hire more workers. All this plan will do is force airlines to reduce scheduled flights so as to reduce the number that are cancelled. Then, instead of having your flight cancelled, you just won’t be able to book one.
Yes, and since this an obvious consequence, I presume it is the intended consequence, as are the stiff price hikes that will follow this reduction in supply. The middle class is being priced out of air travel intentionally, I believe to make them immobile. The UK government is floating shutting down all public airports, eliminating petrol and diesel cars, and reducing passenger car traffic (even if all-electric) to 60% of 2020 levels, to meet its 2050 climate targets. Like I said, enforced immobility.
“you just won’t be able to book one”
They do stuff like that with the on time figures, this should make it easy.
No cancellations, every flight on time.
This is literally what the NAZIs did. Tell companies how many they had to hire and how much to pay them.
Sounds like a union.
The president of Jet Blue was so upset he told the transportation Secretary he wanted to shove a crowbar up his arse. Buttigieg responded that he does not accept bribes.
We have arrived at actual fascism when the government orders companies how many employees they have to have whether they need them or can afford them or not.
It’s worse than that even. To cure problems caused by firing or losing highly skilled pilots, the airlines are told to hire extra low-skilled “customer service workers”, to “help people rebook their flights”. Mostly Dem voters no doubt. And then that’s permanent deadweight on the airlines’ staff. Still no solution regarding pilots, but now prices have to increase even more because of all the “customer service” they’ll be doing.
Just make sure that all the new pilots and all of the other new employees meet the appropriate diversity guidelines..
Can we force a drunken alien to be Pete’s driver?
I nominate Roger Smith.
I guess since the MIA secretary has NEVER had a REAL job he if freaking CUELESS about the TRAINING and TIME required to make an airline employee QUALIFIED for the job!
What a Buffoon and MORON!
What? It’s like filling potholes in Gary, Indiana
Get some union guys to clock in in the morning and then clock out at night.
We are getting in “Atlas Shrugged” territory now. Next it will be wage and price freezes and prohibitions on workers leaving their jobs.
There’s only one fitting word for this affirmative action moron:
Butthead.
Consumer sentiment was reported a while ago at record lows. In the face of prices really going up at about 10 points more than wages and the lack of competence of this administration, I should take bets against Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s shilling against recession, she of the ‘transitory inflation”.
When a doofus—and Bootie Boy is a doofus–is in way over his head, he’s gonna doofus. It’s the nature of the incompetent beast to do that.
Meanwhile, woke United Airlines committed to hire 50% of ther pilots from “diverse” candidates. Ill never fly them again.
Makes me long for the flying days of my youth—there was a better than even chance that the guy in the cockpit did his 30 missions over Europe or spent the early 50s dogfighting MIGS in Korea. Well trained and not going to panic.
And airports were pleasant then too. We were such a great country. Oh well.
And even the airline hostesses were registered nurses with the training to fuel, taxi, and do basic maintenance on the planes.
This is the guy that couldn’t fix the potholes in South Bend IN.
Communists did the same thing in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. When the leaders wanted to compete with the U.S., the forced people to do what they wanted or they were sent to the gulags or Siberia. That’s the only solution communists have, compelling people under threat of violence.
Antifa must be outraged.
Diversity hires. Diversity in training and experience. They’ll start accepting Microsoft Flight Simulator time pretty soon.
This is how nationalized airlines are run in banana republics. Is this how you want airlines run?
At least when King Canute ordered the tide to turn, he did it to illustrate the limits of his power.
Buttigieg, on the other hand, seems to think he could make it work.
This is the economic component of classical Mussolini-style Fascism (corporatism for the squeamish).
Government control of industry through regulation and taxation.
You talk a lot buttigieg not saying anything.
Apologies to David Byrne.