DOJ recordsdata go well with to dam JetBlue-Spirit Airways merger
Lawmakers in Congress and the Transport Employees Union have been crucial of the merger. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Alex Padilla, D-Calif., despatched a letter to the Transportation Division in 2022 expressing “critical concern” concerning the acquisition and requested the company to make use of its “full statutory authority extra vigorously to deal with growing consolidation and dwindling competitors in our airline business.”
In its opposition to the merger, the TWU has cited “gross managerial incompetence at JetBlue Airways” and stated the mix would topic staff and passengers to “the whims of company greed.”
Crew ‘advantages’
Of their joint software to the DOT for approval of the switch of worldwide route authorities, the carriers declare the proposed merger would “profit crew members of each airways,” TWU Worldwide President John Samuelsen wrote in a letter to DOJ. “We view this as flat out false with regards to our members — each private and non-private assertion we’ve acquired from administration has led us to consider a mixed service will undermine the pay and advantages of the present JetBlue flight attendants and Spirit gate brokers.”
Nevertheless, the Affiliation of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, a flight attendants union, has supported the merger, saying that it’s going to “repair critical issues our union has raised for many years” and “enhance competitors with the Massive 4 airways at present controlling 81 % of the U.S. aviation market share.” The union has dubbed the acquisition an “anti-merger merger.”
“It is usually already delivering rapid enhancements for flight attendants at Spirit that will have in any other case been delayed by means of the common bargaining course of below the Railway Labor Act at a service that has but to return to profitability following the pandemic,” union worldwide president Sara Nelson wrote in a letter to DOJ in February.
