Government Sacrificing Productive Workers for Cheap Airfare, The Atlas Society

If you don’t care about the rights of a high-achieving executive whose triumphal deal to create the world’s largest airline may be taken away from him , perhaps Norean Blankenship’s story will move you. She’s a flight attendant from Arizona, and she took unpaid leave to come to Washington this week and make her voice heard.

“If this merger does not come about,” she said, “US Airways and American Airlines may not be able to survive on their own, and I could be out of a job along with thousands of other people.”

And even if US Airways can stay in business alone, its chief executive and labor leaders clearly think it can do better—and they can do better—if the merger goes through.

Blankenship, along with hundreds of other US Airways and American Airlines employees, brought their message to Washington because it’s Washington that’s blocking the merger. US Airways’ stockholders, the bankrupt American Airlines’ creditors , and the bankruptcy judge in the American Airlines case have all approved the deal. But the Department of Justice is going to court to stop it, saying that creating the world’s largest airline would reduce competition and harm consumers.

In its effort to keep air travel from becoming more expensive , DOJ is sacrificing the interests of a wide range of people who make air travel possible: executives, other workers, and investors—that is, it is sacrificing the producers of air travel to the consumers of it. That’s what antitrust does: it forces producers to serve consumers , even at the cost of their own opportunities. And “producers” aren’t just executives like US Airways CEO Doug Parker, they’re investors—and all the employees who could lose if their employers do poorly or go out of business.

That’s one reason why if you care about the rank-and-file workers, you need to care about Doug Parker, and vice-versa: because they are all trying to make money by producing air travel, and if you crush that project, you crush it for all of them.