Unvaccinated United Airlines employees allowed to come back to work

It caused quite an uproar and of course political lines to be drawn in the sand back when United made the announcement a year ago or so when all staff members were being forced to make a choice about whether they were going to get vaccinated or if they were going to be laid-off or not allowed to come to work. They were one of the first major companies based out of the United States to give this sort of order to their staff and thousands of the staff chose to not get vaccinated.

This is something that I took personally because it seemed like overreach on the part of an employer. The way in which the political pundits on one side praised this action and the other side denounced it was maddening.

I'm going to go ahead and say right now that I have only had the displeasure of flying with United a couple of times in the past and they were always an airline that I avoided by any means necessary and would only use them if it was a very short flight, or I had no other choice. My decision to behave this way had nothing to do with their stance on Covid though l- it was because I believe them to be one of the worst airlines in the world.

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Despite having a widely-held reputation of being a terrible airline by just about everyone, United remains one of the largest airline operations in the world and at the time when they mandated that employees get vaccinated, they had 67,000 employees. They were also one of the first airlines to start begging for government handouts whenever their profit margins started to head south during this pandemic as well as any other of the many financial pitfalls that airlines frequently face.

There were only about 200 employees that were steadfast in their stance that they definitely were not going to get vaccinated and United fired all of these people. This resulted in a lawsuit on state and federal courts that still stand to this day. It is easy to look at this situation and say that United has only reversed course on this decision so that the lawsuits will simply go away.

Since they made the announcement in early March the company has asked a federal court to dismiss the case since starting on the 28th of March that they are allowing staff to return to work regardless of vaccination status citing that the lawsuit is now "moot."

If there wasn't enough reasons to not fly with United already which includes terrible service, substandard planes, and outright rude staff - this is kind of the icing on the cake of reasons to avoid them. I'm not saying it should be a big surprise when a gigantic company doesn't really care about their employees, but for me at least, this decision has nothing to do with United "waking up" and realizing that the mandate on their part was unnecessary to beging with, but they are tired of spending money on lawyers in ongoing legal battles.

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While not directly related to Covid attitudes you can see that United isn't exactly a favorite among US passengers as far as overall impression of quality is concerned. It's interesting to me that American Airlines, which is also a gigantic airline, is the only other major US airline that is ranked below United. Southwest tops out the customer satisfaction list and is a budget, no-frills airline and they are winning against their much larger competitor.

While I applaud them in their decision to reverse their decision to force employees to get the jab, I don't think it is because of altruism, compassion, or admitting that the decision was a mistake in the first place.

Even though I am sure that the decision was made because of a partial boycott of the airline based on feelings about Covid regulations it is still one that I am glad that they made it. I, like millions of other airlines, will continue to choose literally any other airline other than United in the future if it is possible, but it is nice to see that things are changing globally as far as attitudes towards travel and the people who provide it are concerned.

Next up will be the pointless mask mandates that still exist on planes in the US which is something that has always been really crazy seeing as how you are allowed to have your mask off provided you are eating or drinking something, which everyone does on a plane at one point or another so even if you do believe that masks work (I don't) you have to admit that people removing them all at the same time in order to have a meal, would kind of defeat the purpose in an enclosed environment with recirculated air in it.

The official memo from executives still indicates that if a new variant arises that the ban on unvaccinated staff could be reinstated. In my mind this is just more proof that this decision was made exclusively to get their asses out of court, and no other reason.