Stock buy-backs and dividends instead of fixing infrastructure
As travelers and airline workers reel from mass flight cancellations, a corporate watchdog noted Wednesday that Southwest Airlines spent nearly $6 billion on stock buybacks in the years ahead of the coronavirus pandemic instead of spending that money on technological improvements that unions have been demanding for years.
According to Accountable.US, the crisis Southwest has experienced in recent days amid a massive winter storm was “a problem of its own making,” noting that the airline opted “to spend $5.6 billion on stock buybacks in the three years leading up to the pandemic rather than making investments in infrastructure to be better prepared for extreme weather events like this week.”
The watchdog group added that the company “even reinstated dividends earlier this month, the first major airline to do so after the pandemic.”
“Southwest Airlines made a risky gamble that mass layoffs and spending billions of dollars on handouts to investors rather than fixing infrastructure would pay off with record profits,” Kyle Herrig, the president of Accountable.US, said in a statement. “The airline lost that bet badly and now it’s their customers left paying the price including the thousands stranded in the middle of holiday-season travel.”
Heads should roll over this although I don’t know if they will. This is yet another example of the untrammeled greed that characterizes our economic system in 2021. They are determined to make workers and consumers miserable and dare us to do something about it. Will we?
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