Unsanitized: Flying to the Unemployment Lines

Plus, the genuinely difficult debate over schools. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for September 29, 2020.

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First Response

When the airline industry first secured its bailout in the CARES Act, it included a provision that would prevent layoffs until September 30. The assumption from everyone is that the layoffs would then commence October 1. That would be in two days, and it’s still the expectation, barring 11th-hour action from Congress, which doesn’t move at the pace to enable 11th-hour action.

American Airlines expects to cut 19,000 jobs on October 1. By October, the airline expects to have 40,000 fewer employees than it did on January 1. United made a deal to save the jobs of 2,800 pilots through reduced flying hours, but 12,000 layoffs are still expected. Southwest didn’t expect any involuntary layoffs because a quarter of its workforce took voluntary buyouts, something that attracted thousands of workers at the other major airlines to leap before they were thrown off the cliff. Meanwhile the feeder airlines to the major carriers are consolidating. ExpressJet, a feeder to United, ends service tomorrow.

Airlines and its labor unions have unsuccessfully attempted to secure another $28 billion to extend the layoff-protected relief to next year, in the hopes that a post-vaccine world will resume flying at higher levels. Practically the only lobbyists making personal contact with lawmakers are flight attendants who serve these still-frequent flyers, pleading with them for support as they go from Washington to their districts. But that has only gone so far. Congress is in no mood to make any deal on anything involving money, and anyway, these layoffs won’t show up in a jobs report until after the election.

Read all of our Unsanitized reports

There’s a real question as to whether airlines deserve special treatment and not, say, mass transit, or restaurants, or any of a thousand other industries. The right thing to do would be to level up relief to support these sectors, but we’re determined to level down. Airlines, alone among all sectors, at least agreed to some temporary conditions to protect jobs. The cash sitting in the Fed’s money cannon could be deployed with conditions on jobs and climate (in the airlines’ case) and other options, instead of being used indirectly for asset inflation. But that’s where we are.

Meanwhile, an alternate-reality bill out of the House Transportation Committee to fix safety problems with the Boeing 737 Max was released yesterday. Based on a committee investigation, “includes dozens of changes, including strengthening whistle-blower protections and requiring experts to review Boeing’s safety culture and make recommendations for improvement,” and would authorize more hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration for safety compliance, writes the New York Times.

But does the bill include a fictitious country where Boeing can sell planes when the old ones start to age? Because there hasn’t been a lot of wear and tear put on these aircraft lately. Certifying the 737 Max to fly again just isn’t going to lead to a lot of sales, if any. Congress is simultaneously ignoring the threat to workers in aviation and making diligent rules based on an assumption that aviation will bounce back. Maybe if the steps to recovery were actually being taken, the efforts on airplane safety would be admirable. But from this vantage point they look painfully out of touch.

The School Debate

Alec MacGillis is an excellent reporter, and his ProPublica piece about the digital divide and remote learning, and how it’s stunting educational growth in a way we haven’t seen in this country since the advent of compulsory schooling (or, if we’re talking about Black student, since the too-slow tearing down of Jim Crow), is essential reading. You can’t help but feel for the students he profiles, who are being set back at a critical time in development.

The story, however, hinges on the idea that classroom learning is perfectly safe. There is much citation of studies and evidence from other countries to this effect. But other countries haven’t had the trajectory that we’ve had in the U.S., and as Rachel Cohen notes in an important thread, the studies are fairly thin.

MacGillis states that children are mostly not at risk of sickness from the virus, but they’re not alone in the rooms, and they can spread the disease to parents and adults who may get sick. The data is light (it’s hard to get a kid tested) and in many cases being suppressed. Most important, there has been almost no money appropriated to schools to actually engage in the kind of safety measures—changing ventilation, adding PPE, reducing class sizes—that MacGillis identifies as important to returning to in-person learning.

One-sided approaches to genuinely difficult problems aren’t helpful. We’re failing children at the same time we’re failing educators and everyone else. Meanwhile the Trump administration has been pressuring the CDC to reopen schools, and stories like Alec’s play right into their hands.

This has become an extremely personal issue for parents and they are right to be angry. Leaving students behind will be a scar we live with for decades. But nobody is actually trying to get kids back in schools as much as they’re talking about it. You have to do the work.

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

187.

Today I Learned

The Prospect will have coverage of tonight’s debate, where the pandemic might be discussed. Visit our website this evening and follow along with our staff on Twitter. (TAP)

The coronavirus death toll is now over 1 million globally. (CNN)

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