Southwest's Mass Flight Cancellations Have Turned Into a Vaccine Conspiracy Theory
This weekend, over 2,000 reported Southwest Airlines cancellations brought untold thousands of passengers to their knees. The airline has the boring reason: “weather.” Conservatives have a more thrilling one: a working-class rebellion against President Joe Biden’s vaccination tyranny. So victory against Democrats is weary masses forced to stand in line for hours at dawn, sleep on the floor, and make TikToks, while baggage piles up around the conveyor belt.
Among them, Sen. Ted Cruz is spreading an unverified rumor that pilots staged a massive “sickout” to protest “Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate.” Newsweek’s deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon asked: “Were the canceled flights the result of a ‘sick out’ on the part of pilots refusing to get vaccinated?” and continued, baselessly, to conclude that this represents a “powerful form of collective action” by working-class vaccine-refusers.
Southwest Airlines pilots have denied that theory, which seems spun from the fact Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA), a bargaining unit representing over 9,000 pilots, filed a request last Friday asking that a Dallas federal court block the airline from enforcing vaccine mandates.
If Cruz read the motion, he’d likely hate their rationale; SWAPA’s staking out a labor rights stance, arguing that Southwest illegally neglected to bargain with the union over the policy change. The motion says that Southwest also doesn’t offer minimum pay during mandatory quarantine time, and other airlines came to the bargaining table to negotiate covid-19 policies with their unions. They say the airline sprung a last-minute deadline on pilots which weakened the union by forcing it into a “fire drill response.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/southwests-mass-flight-cancellations-have-turned-into-a-vaccine-conspiracy-theory/ar-AAPnNzi