Originally Posted by FBKSan

I'm not arguing in favor or against this behavior one way or the other, but somehow the rationale seems pretty straightforward. Why does it have to be that the employees view the customers as "enemies"? The customers provide United with revenue, and if the customers aren't happy, the revenue goes elsewhere. In this case, if customers fly UA because of CH9 and the crew removes CH9, some (marginal) customers may choose not to fly, thus the crew affects UA's bottom line. I'm not saying it's a good system, but I can understand the logic on some level (and yes, it's easy to see how this could backfire).

Someone with more experience with labor relations (me = none) can probably speak to what methods are more effective than this (I'm sure they exist).