Key lawmaker quizzes airlines on delays, worker shortages – KIRO 7 News Seattle

WASHINGTON – (AP) – A key Senator asks six U.S. airlines to explain the high rates of delayed and canceled flights this summer and asks if there is a labor shortage despite the fact that airlines are receiving billions in federal aid to help workers to keep in the workplace.

Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Committee, sent letters to the CEOs of American, Southwest, Delta, JetBlue, Republic and Allegiant on Friday. She wrote that she was concerned about reports highlighting the role of labor shortages in a spate of delayed and canceled flights.

In identical letters to the CEOs, Cantwell said that every airline poorly manages its employees and, in the worst case scenario, “has failed to fulfill its taxpayer funding intent and has not prepared for the surge in travel that we are now witnessing”.

Since March 2020, when the pandemic began to suppress air travel, Congress has approved $ 54 billion to keep airline workers. As a condition of the aid, the airlines were forbidden to take workers off leave, but they persuaded tens of thousands of employees to voluntarily buy-out, take early retirement or long-term vacations in order to save costs.

Now the airlines are trying to increase their staff. This week, American cited rising passenger numbers and said it would recall 3,300 flight attendants from long-term vacations and hire 800 more before the end of the year. Delta said it will hire up to 5,000 employees this year to reduce long waiting times for customers calling the airline and to deal with labor shortages among contractors such as food suppliers and aircraft cleaners.

Airlines and their unions are campaigning for federal aid, which has been extended twice and is due to end on September 30th. Airlines for America trade group said that without the money, “the impact of the pandemic on our industry would have been far more devastating”. and our workforce, and our return to Heaven would have been slowed dramatically. “

Government figures show that around 35,000 airline jobs were lost last fall when the aid temporarily expired. Jobs were restored when Congress extended the wage relief.

Southwest, one of the companies hardest hit by delays, said Friday it used the federal money to continue flying to all airports it served prior to the pandemic. It attributed the recent delays to summer thunderstorms and technological “challenges” last month, which resulted in an unusually high number of delays and flight cancellations.

The number of people flying in the US bottomed out at less than 100,000 a day in April 2020. It has increased from around 700,000 a day in early February to around 2 million a day in July, though that is still 20% less in the month in 2019, before the pandemic.

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