Personally, I think the unions had a legitimate grievance over Norwegian's flag of convenience. Look, whether we like it or not, aviation is governed by bilateral treaty. As an American, I can't go and just start an airline in most foreign countries. And foreigners can't just start an airline in the USA. And an Indonesian airline can't just decide it wants to fly from New York to London.
In this context, I personally would take a dim view of what Norwegian did: basically set up a dummy company in Ireland in order to operate these EU to USA flights. If it had been an Indonesian company -- hiring low wage employees for the service -- would you be OK with it?
Of course, in the end, none of this really matters. If Norwegian had a VIABLE business model, it would. Since their model is not viable, they probably would have been better off not being allowed to launch this service!
