Mrs. Clinton’s Flight Plan
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Senator Clinton has been flying around the nation on chartered campaign planes and private jets so consistently that she’s lost touch with commercial aviation. How else to explain the statement issued yesterday by her campaign in respect of reports of possible mergers between Delta and Northwest airlines and between Continental and United airlines? “If carriers decide to combine in order to cut costs and increase their market clout, we will have to take a hard look at the potential effects on workers,” Mrs. Clinton said, calling it “vitally important that any proposed merger preserve the jobs and worker protections on which thousands of families rely.”
Well, it’s been a while since Mrs. Clinton held a job in the private sector, but surely she realizes that one of the reasons companies merge is to eliminate redundant jobs and to thereby realize efficiencies that can save money for consumers and create value for shareholders. If Mrs. Clinton’s standard had been applied historically to the airline industry, PeopleExpress, Eastern, Pan Am, and Piedmont would still be limping along, and Virgin Atlantic, JetBlue, and Southwest would probably never have started flying.
What matters for the American economy, in other words, isn’t jobs at any single particular airline, but the overall health of the commercial aviation industry. And a key to that health isn’t a static set of operators frozen in time, but a dynamic market that allows newcomers to enter and other companies to either merge or fold. There are European economies in which workers are guaranteed jobs for life, but the cost is sharply higher unemployment and slower growth rates. If some pilots and flight attendants are left temporarily out of work by the dislocations of the mergers, they may find better paying jobs in the private jet industry, which has been booming, not only from the business generated by Mrs. Clinton and the other presidential contenders, but from the wealth generated during an administration in Washington that has understood the dynamism of a free-market economy.
