Bring Your Riot Gear

Given the high profile of United's very public faux pas of forcibly removing what appears to be a bloody and unconscious Vietnamese doctor from one of its delayed flights in Chicago, there are going to be a whole lotta folks weighing in on this. My Facebook is exploding with it. Truthfully, I don't know what I don't know, since I wasn't there. What I do know, since I travel United and have some 500,000 miles saved up on that airline, is that they are now in serious trouble.

It is not, in any business world in any decent Westernized country, "acceptable practice," to beat and drag off a paying customer because your employees need to be in another city to make a flight. At what point did United in all its wisdom determine that the (over)paying customer was far less important than its own employees? This is where the so called fabled Friendly Skies has in fact flown way off course.

When an airline finds it perfectly acceptable to forcefully remove paid customers, terrify other passengers, create what is now an international incident that will most assuredly become a massive lawsuit all in order to send its own employees to a city to make a deadline, and this was caused due to overbooking which was not the passengers' fault in the first place, then that airline has a lot of explaining to do. They have victimized and punished the passengers, publicly humiliated them in the worst possible way, behaved like the very worst of a Banana Republic to get their way and in the process, apparently abused an Asian doctor who had patients waiting for him in the morning. It is hard to imagine a worse scenario. That the person they dragged off happens to be a person of color, and a doctor on top of that, with patients who needed him, come on United. And you with this big pro-diversity stance?

Here is what United says about diversity on its website:

Through our Diversity and Inclusion strategy, we find innovative and effective solutions to engage employees from diverse backgrounds and cultures in taking our flyer-friendly service around the globe. We are driving to become recognized as an airline where:

• leaders embrace diversity and inclusion as a business advantage
• employees feel highly valued, are actively engaged and are treated with dignity and respect
• customers value our inclusive approach to delivering flyer-friendly service

Clearly this doesn't include passengers.

The United employees who did replace the booted paying passengers were (rightfully) verbally abused. The rest were traumatized. The more than 34,000 comments that landed on United's Facebook page largely excoriated their pablum response to this incident and for the most part clearly indicated that folks are talking with their feet. Entire corporations are moving their travel business elsewhere.

Clearly if you want a safe experience on United, you'd better be an United employee. At least this way someone will be employed to jerk a nursing mother by the hair, drag her and her infant child bodily down the aisle, and leave her milk-stained seat for you so that you can make your flight in Boise. After all, that's a hell of a lot more important than a worthless paying customer, right, United?

In a leaked memo to employees, Munoz praised them for going "above and beyond," which simply exemplifies this "damn the customer, us first" attitude. The New York Post excoriated Munoz for being tone deaf. That's an understatement. Huge corporations fail because of such stupidity, pigheadedness and bunker mentality. The addiction to being right at the cost of customer trust is a lesson in arrogance. This is a war you cannot win. If we don't think we can fly safely on your airline, Munoz, we won't. You have shown yourself to be an arrogant prick when there was an opportunity to walk your talk. United's statements about customer service and diversity are nothing more than platitudes. Good employees will leave, too, no longer willing to be aligned with liars. Integrity matters. United has lost theirs.

Most of us want to believe that such a thing would never happen in our America. Yet there we are. It did, on United's watch. An American company acting like jackbooted Nazis, using police power to pry a passenger out of a paid seat to let an employee fly because of bad planning on the company's part. In no way does this narrative become "acceptable practices."

Oscar Munoz, United's CEO, and his henchmen published pitifully weak responses to this offensive behavior, sparking even greater outcry. The inhumane, insensitive and brutal way this evolved underscored the increasingly selfish, greedy and grasping culture of our airline industry, held by fewer and fewer big companies who care less and less about us and more and more about profits. The commitment to be right rather than be sensitive, sorry and humane has thrown kerosene on the fire, provided comedians with far more material and raised the issue to an even greater level of absurdity. Hiding behind airline policy in a situation like this is business suicide. Inhumanity to a passenger is just inhumanity. Trying to justify it by using "the rules" make us all less than human.

If anyone has any questions whatsoever about whether or not this is true, kindly ask the gentleman who was summarily dragged off the airplane with blood on his face, his glasses askew, his shirt hiked over his body, virtually unconscious. That was a paying customer. This is how United treats their paying customers, folks. Videos don't lie.

You could be next.