This came my way from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives....
1) The Class Structure of Flying by Jim Stanford
I have finally succeeded in life. No, I didn’t win the lottery.
And far from making me rich, my puny mutual fund has only kept pace with
the TSE’s downhill march. Rather, the news of my upward mobility came
recently in the form of a glamourously embossed package >from Air Canada.
Thanks to my many travels last year, I am now a prestigious “Elite” member
of their Aeroplan frequent flyer program.
While naturally thrilled with my newfound status, I was also curiously
subdued. For it seems to me that the overdeveloped hierarchy of frequent
flyer plans (there are 4 levels of membership in Aeroplan: regular,
Prestige, Elite, and Super-Elite) typifies the growing inequality of
airline travel these days–which in turn reflects the accelerating
inequality of our whole society.
My Elite package included a snazzy gold membership card to replace my
plain old red one, now an embarrassing relic of my plebeian past. Gold
luggage tags ensure that my bags are among the first off the plane. I get
special secret phone numbers so that I’m never placed on hold when I call
to book a ticket. And I get ten certificates for costless upgrades to the
first-class section of the plane.
Once safely buckled into that extra-wide seat, I benefit from a menu of
luxuries ranging from nicer nuts to silver cutlery to free drinks. For me,
the most important is the front cabin’s markedly higher bathroom-per-capita
ratio. An Air Canada A320, for example, features one toilet exclusively
for the 24 roped-off first-class seats. The back of the bus contains only
two more toilets for the remaining 108 passengers. And even as Air Canada
insists that seat belts be worn throughout the flight for passenger safety,
it forces economy patrons to stand dangerously in line for the loo–rather
than use an empty first-class stall and violate this inflight apartheid.
Like any class system, the class structure of flying demonstrates an
inherent tendency to increasing inequality: the rich get richer, and the
poor get bumped. For example, Air Canada occasionally offers free upgrades
to first-class when its economy seats are oversold. Who gets the free
upgrades? Certainly not the passengers most in need of some extra
pampering–elderly travelers, disabled persons, or parents with children.
The upgrades aren’t even handed out randomly, like a lottery. Rather, the
airline uses its internal database to identify Super-Elite, Elite, or
Prestige members flying on the cheap that day. They are called forward to
discreetly receive new first-class boarding passes. Just like tax cuts,
this manna from heaven is handed out to those who are already rich.
The same thing occurs when a flight is cancelled: super-elites get the
first seats on the next plane, regardless of who was at the airport first
or who really needs to get home the fastest. It all makes bottom-line
sense for the airline, which works hard to please its big-money customers.
After all, these elite flyers generate a huge share of Air Canada’s total
revenue. But the policy runs smack into a knee-jerk principle of fairness
that we teach our children, and that still infiltrates our
consciousness–namely, the idea that reasonable human beings should wait
their turn.
If the Titanic had been run on the same principles as Aeroplan, there
would have been an announcement over the loudspeakers after the ship hit
the iceberg: “General boarding of lifeboats will commence shortly.
Super-Elite and Elite travelers may board at their convenience.”
Modern business culture celebrates this inequality, consistent with
its enthusiastic embrace of the dog-eat-dog ethos. Consider, for instance,
an ad for the Internet portal MySap.com. A trim blonde executive is
sitting in a departure lounge when the flight is cancelled. She turns on
her laptop, connects to MySap.com, and quickly rebooks herself on the next
flight. She then reclines with a satisfied smile as the camera pans the
faces of less agile travelers–seniors, disheveled tourists, even a nun,
their confused expressions testimony to their pathetic inability to get
with the program. Beating others to the first available airline seat
becomes a parable for succeeding more generally in capitalist competition.
The goal is not just to get home fast. It’s to get home faster
than someone else. So Air Canada’s strategy is to make its most important
passengers feel they’ve been treated better than the others. Some
first-class lounges are little more than overcrowded cafeterias. But so
long as you must pass through guarded silver doors to get in, knowing that
the rest of the traveling hordes are excluded, then that overcrowded
cafeteria becomes a gold-plated perquisite.
Class inequality pervades our society in innumerable ways, of
course, most of them far more important than the comparatively trivial
hierarchy of a modern airline. Perhaps what makes the class structure of
flying so grating is the visibility and proximity of its divisions.
Inequality is always more alarming and offensive when the rich and the poor
are right next to each other. Latin American cities symbolize extreme
inequality because miserable slums are built right next to luxury
high-rises. Similar gaps exist between, say, the teeming tenements of
Toronto’s St. Jamestown and the mansions of >Rosedale a few blocks north.
But just enough distance separates the two neighbourhoods to prevent them
from being portrayed in a single shocking photograph.
Following this same logic, Air Canada is now relocating its
first-class check-in desks to self-contained areas completely separate from
the long pens corralling economy passengers. Elite travelers can now
speedily check-in without enduring angry glares from the queues they are
jumping. Discreetly located first-class lounges follow the same recipe.
But until Air Canada launches completely separate all-luxury flights, the
flying upper-crust must still be sensitive to the rabble lurking behind the
dangerously thin curtain behind their enclave.
There’s one grain of solace for the traveling sods whose proletarian
status places them behind that curtain. If a deranged lunatic should one
day invade the flight deck and seize control, consider this as the plane
plunges headlong to the ground: your life will last about one second longer
than the fat cats in first-class.
The secret Elite reservation number is 1-888-738-1777: call early, call
often!
