ChrisH,
I am sorry if my vigorous debating style seems like I am "jumping" on you... in fact I think you are one of the more thoughtful contributors and seem willing to consider the alternatives and even change your position in the light of the debate. I don't think you have an agenda.
The concerns about labour rules and American ownership issues are whipped up by both US companies and unions and the arguments put forward are often bogus. The unions fear loss of control and the companies fear the loss of their monopolies. The reason I challenge these is because these are, ironically, against the US national interest. Both of my children are US citizens. I am not anti US, and I vigorously defend the US when debating issues with Europeans. Anti-US sentiment (particularly during the Bush years) has been high in recent years, and I do my bit to defend the US against some of the more ridiculous accusations from Europeans. However, I do feel your concerns are ungrounded. There are a number of ways in which the US can protect their labour laws and still allow foreign competition.
They could require all foreign owned airlines operating internal flights in the US to have a US base. In reality, only Canada and Mexico could realistically avoid this anyway. If British Airways operated the flight, by the time their crews had crossed the Atlantic, they would be outside the required "rest period" rules. It would be prohibitively expensive to base British crews in the US and far cheaper to hire local labour.
The labour unions wish to imply that US pay and conditions are higher than the rest of the world and if "foreign" carriers were allowed in they would pay less. This is also false. Let's look at the British Airways example provided by Chris. In fact, the opposite is the case. British Airways recently launched a new subsiduary called OpenSkies. This subsiduary operates business class only flights from Paris and Amsterdam to New York. They had the choice of operating the flights with crews based in Paris or New York. Guess where they hired the crews from? NEW YORK. Why did they do that? Because labour laws in the US give far less rights to their employees than European ones do, and the wages were considerably lower. There is a parallel debate to this one in another forum (pprune) in which Europeans are complaining that BA used US crews to circumvent high wages and better working conditions in Europe vs the US!!
We either believe in free enterprise or we don't. The lack of competition in the US airline industry is leading to the airlines to exploit their monopolies. The injection of competition will provide a boost and hopefully drive up standards. The introduction of competition needs to be accompanied by stricter regulations relating to market share, passenger rights, etc and some of the larger carriers need to be either broken up or allowed to go bankrupt (I suggest we start with Delta).
I know that this will cause short term "pain" to some people who are hard working and have families. This applied also to the railroad robber barons, the steel magnates, the telecommunications giants, etc... abusive monopolies have to be broken up for the greater good and in the longer term the market will provide better, cheaper services and ultimately more employment.;
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