Customer or livestock: how can you tell the difference when passengers become parcels?

March 5, 2007

The slide from civilization to the urge to slaughter, from good cheer to misery, is steep and quick. Air Canada recently taught me that.

Even this morning, back at home, the words "lost luggage" and "airplane" can send me into spasms.

I flew to Ottawa one night to make a quick speech at an International Women's Day breakfast, although I felt guilty about not taking the train (good feminist, bad human). The intention was to return to Toronto at noon the next day on an astonishingly cheap hour-long Air Canada flight.

I oppose cheap airfares, because of the damage to the planet, because of passengers so scary I would abandon the subway car that contained them, and because I wouldn't be asked to give distant speeches at a time of day when honest people are still abed if it weren't so very affordable.

When I wrote this in a newspaper column five years ago, I was attacked for elitism. But I'll say it again. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan's disastrous deregulation of the airline industry, which began in 1978 and spread internationally, has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of airline employees, poisoned the planet and made flight a perfect foodless hell, all in the name of making what actually is an expensive product, cheap. It was money that ruled, rather than human needs.

Prepare for boarding

I was at Ottawa Airport's Gate 15 with no seat assignment, always a bad sign.

When the staff announced with extreme rudeness that the flight was cancelled (the storm was hours from arrival), I figured it was due to calculated over- and under-booking.

Customers rightly go insane over cancellations because the airline dumps you in it, refusing to provide the service you purchased and making you retrieve your own bags, find another flight and go through the whole check-in-boarding-card mess again.

In other industries, selling you something and not delivering it is called fraud. I had no choice but to wait it out; the trains were fully booked.

I sat at a restaurant in Ottawa's charmless little airport cursing the airline, as people at other tables chimed in. The only comfort was the easy friendliness of the waiters, which set me thinking.

I was reading Grotesque, the new novel from the great Japanese writer Natsuo Kirino. Her first novel to be translated into English, Out, was about working-class women assembling cold lunches on a factory night shift. Its theme was meat, and the way humans eventually become mere meat, even to themselves.

Grotesque is similarly about the commodification of humans, in this case via social class, beauty as a mechanism to transcend class, and prostitution in its various forms, including as employment.

Words louder than "action"

As I read Kirino, the voice of an Air Canada agent screeched through the entire departure level, her harsh and angry voice cutting into my headache and making it hum.

She berated passengers for approaching the desk at her particular gate, said she was busy, had 60 standbys to deal with, warned that she wouldn't take questions. She would "action" when she could, but until then.…

My friend was marvelling about the bovine passivity of the passengers and muttering "class-action suit."

Reluctantly, I hauled myself over to the screaming agent's kiosk and told her she had behaved intolerably. I had been sitting quietly at another gate, and she did not have the right to scream at thousands of helpless strangers.

She refused to apologize.

I was back at the restaurant gnawing on Polyfilla chicken bones when I noticed a small, elegant slate-gray sign next to me: Porter Airlines. I am politically opposed to this brand-new airline because it flies to Toronto Island Airport, whose proximity damages quality of life in the city.

I raced over to beg them to get me out of Ottawa. Expecting spittle, I instead was welcomed at the departure desk by a friendly woman agent in a great turquoise porter's pillbox hat. Yes, we can fly you home. Yes, you can buy your ticket right here. No, you don't need to thank me. Yes, I like my hat too. Just wait here and we'll get you on board.

And they did.

They charged me $265 one-way but I would have paid thousands, anything. The flight attendants were funny and generous. I love this airline, I said aloud. My left-wing friend warned me that it wasn't genuine friendliness. "They're just trying to lure new customers." Considered me lured, I said. Call me hooked.

The flight attendants assured me their pay was good (and they knew Air Canada's pay) and yes, they had health benefits. Air Canada probably offers better health benefits but I muse that Air Canada employees, if left alone with their passengers, might need those benefits badly.

Out of residual courtesy, we BlackBerryed Air Canada to warn them we would miss our 4 p.m. flight (later cancelled anyway). They said my luggage, if left behind, would be considered lost. It's your job to find it and collect it, a man said smugly and then rudely hung up.

In other words, I'm less than human. I'm dumped like luggage. In fact, I'm even less than luggage. At least my bag is allocated a place, albeit one I can't find.

Hands on misery

It was like Fawlty Towers with Basil Fawlty complaining that it would be a lovely hotel if it weren't for all those repulsive customers asking to stay at the inn.

I used to openly sympathize with Air Canada staff, knowing the airline was treating them with massive disrespect. I no longer feel this way. The airline treats the staff no worse than the staff treats passengers.

Instead of resolving to do a good job despite working conditions, they seem to go out of their sullen way to pass along the pain. "Man hands on misery to man," Phillip Larkin wrote. "It deepens like a coastal shelf."

And thus everyone loses: Air Canada, shareholders, staff, customers, the economy, and all of us because the mania for cheap air travel squelched interest in high-speed rail.

We're living in a Kirino novel. Passengers are not human, we are commodities complicit in our own degradation by not complaining about it. Employees soaked in hatred have made the choice to dump it on those of us farther down the retail scale.

It's called abuse of power, and the abuse flows downhill.

Meanwhile, back at the island

Porter kept its word. We were diverted to Pearson International Airport but they bused us through a blizzard to downtown Toronto where I boarded Toronto's wonderful subway and raced across the city in great comfort.

I slept badly and woke up to face the "confused alarms of struggle and flight" that are the consequence of modern air travel. All my metaphors are military. As I hunt for my lost baggage, I feel like a single foot soldier out to clash with the "ignorant army" that is Air Canada.

Rage, rage against the machine.