United Airlines overbooked and asked people to accept travel voucher money to take a later flight.
Actually, they were not even over-booked. They had four United employees they wanted on the plane, so they tried to offer money to get people to get off. This was not even a legitimate overbooking.
When the people who had already boarded the plane refused the $400, $800 or $1200 vouchers good for future travel for a limited time, partly because the next flight was not available until the following afternoon, the United staff called Chicago's airport police and then it got ugly.
Actually the rules are United should have given him a document explaining why he was being removed and why he was chosen. That didn't happen.
If you haven't seen the video yet, here it is.
There were a few people on the flight who spoke out. But most just looked on in shock as this atrocity happened. The details may cost United Airlines, since this was not a real overbooking, which airlines are allowed to do. Actually, about 40,000 passengers are bumped each year-- close to ten percent of them on United Airlines.
David Swanson points out that if the passengers had taken a stand things would have been different, saying,
"Do not sit still like a United Airlines passenger in a video when an injustice is happening. If the other passengers had simply blocked the aisles, corporate thugs could not have dragged their fellow passenger away. If everyone on board had demanded that the airline offer higher compensation until someone volunteered to take a later flight, rather than being violently "reaccommodated," then it would have done so."
The landscape of the USA is filled with similar situations, where corporations use the police to assault and abuse innocent citizens, or assault and inappropriately abuse suspect citizens. United Airlines CEO will probably not last the month. He's made some very bad statements. Add that to the fact that he's recently had a heart transplant and it is likely that he'll soon resign. I'd bet it happens before the end of the month.
I wonder how much his exit bonus is going to be? https://t.co/m8HZ9SYy7i at https://t.co/m8HZ9SYy7i
— Dave Vasques (@DaveVasques) April 11, 2017United Airlines stock, at the time of this writing is expected to drop by five to six percent-- which will mean at least a billion dollar drop in company value.
There is major talk of boycotting United. But is it even boycotting, when they act so badly. Jimmy Kimmel did his opening monologue on the incident and created this video to satirize it. The satirical ad starts a few seconds after 4 minutes in.
But it's not funny. It's infuriatingly outrageous. United's victim, the 69 year old doctor who wanted to get home to see his patients, deserves massive compensation. United deserves massive damages. It appears that the people will punish United from the bottom up, causing its stock price to plummet.
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