Originally Posted by
sanfran8080
Sack Oscar???
No. No United CEO since the '80s has been able to tame United employees. Oscar's only the latest.
This story has gone supersonic because it crystallizes the whole United meta-narrative, e.g. it's a brutal, indifferent, slipshod airline that plays chess against its customers, takes them for granted, and reneges on commitments. Here's the whole UA reputation summed up in a couple of cell phone videos. Naturally it resonates, and there's not much Oscar or anyone else can do about it.
Originally Posted by
ssk1127
UA fans will scoff, but the only way to "fix" this for UA is to visibly fire everyone in the chain of command from the gate agent to the CEO who created this debacle. It's a cultural problem at the company.
Easier said than done. If UA had the power to fire every rude, mocking, aggressive, flippant, disrespectful front-line employee, it would (A) create a lot of job vacancies and (B) much improve the UA customer experience. But union protections mean those employees are pretty much impervious. Oscar doesn't ratify or condone assaulting paying customers, but he can't stop it (or the many more common, less publicized abuses of passengers) because UA front-liners have such vast discretion.
The power to force change rests with the customer base. UA will never "volunteer" to be better because change is painful. But if the top 500 corporate accounts pulled the plug, or Chinese-originating traffic dried up, etc. the pain of lost revenue would loom larger than the pain of firing UA's inside saboteurs and changing the culture.