Aviation sector bosses globally are pursuing rapid expansion despite the climate crisis, with the International Civil Aviation Organization predicting doubling of air traffic by the late 2030s.
Even in the UK, with its already over-expanded aviation industry, the Government’s climate-indifferent “Jet Zero Strategy” endorses 70% expansion by 2050. Expansion plans have already been launched or greenlighted at airports around the country — though with strong opposition from community and climate campaigners.
A key way the industry sells its antisocial agenda is job creation. Even before the wider climate and social questions are reached, however, the “argument” is false. Rapid expansion of the sector in recent decades has not meant a jobs bonanza and will not in future.
A report on aviation published by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in July found that, despite major industry expansion, the number of jobs in air transport was lower in 2019 (pre-pandemic-job losses) than in 2007. The number of jobs relative to passenger numbers has steadily declined, from 695 per million in 2000 to 459 in 2019. Moreover the sector’s job potential creation per pound invested has since 2015 ranked among the lowest.
NEF also reports that since 2008, amidst expansion, air transport has experienced the largest real-terms wage cuts of any of 96 “sub-sectors” of the UK economy: and before 2020 it was already second worst in this regard. Wage decline in air transport supporting jobs, eg in airports, has also been far larger than across the economy as a whole. The spate of pay strikes at airports this year have been about current inflation, but also trying to make up major lost ground.
As NEF sums up: “So who exactly is benefiting from ever more air travel? You needn’t look much further than the highly paid executives, the private shareholders, and the wealthy minority of frequent flyers.”
This reality surely means there is the possibility of the labour movement, or sections of it, agitating effectively against expansion of aviation and for alternative policies, on grounds of jobs, wages and workers’ rights as well as climate change.
Union resources
Unite the Union, which has a large membership in many parts of aviation, has generally echoed employers’ arguments in favour of expanding the industry, as has GMB. Civil service union PCS, which also has members in the sector (NATS air traffic control, the CAA industry regulator, and some workers in airports), has taken a more independent and left-wing stance, and produced resources usefully exploring the issues.
Unfortunately these resources cannot be found on PCS’s website — perhaps reflecting, in addition to the general poorness of the site, devaluing of the union’s important climate work by the dominant section of its leadership. But Protecting Jobs, Protecting the Planet (2013), A Green New Deal for Gatwick (2020) and Aviation Democracy: The Case for Public Ownership (2020) can all be found on the website of climate-oriented aviation workers’ organisation Safe Landing. They have also republished rail and transport union RMT’s 2008 Who Says There’s No Alternative?, on expansion of rail as an alternative to aviation. (For Solidarity's interview with Safe Landing last year, see here.)
Curbing expansion
The 2013 report resulted from discussion on reconciling PCS’s developing climate and environmental policy - including opposition to many aspects of aviation expansion - with protecting the interests of its members in the sector. It noted that already at that time, “in an increasingly deregulated industry, the formula that increased amounts of air traffic leads inevitably to job creation cannot be assumed… indeed the signs are that the opposite is likely to be true”.
The report’s advocacy of solutions was tentative — presumably deliberately, given its purpose of developing discussion between the union’s national leadership and its Aviation section. Much of what it focused on, though, was prescient.
At that time the Review Group that produced the report argued that a holistic view allowed “for some limited expansion of flight numbers”. However it criticised the automatic push for further expansion driven by the dominant “free market approach” and criticised particular proposals for expansion.
(Safe Landing opposes expansion specifically on the basis that it will mean a disastrous reversal for the sector in the near future, maximising job losses and more general regression, very likely at workers’ expense. A sustainable future for aviation, in both senses, means “right sizing” the sector now, at least dramatically curbing its expansion. Moreover such curbing might actually be compatible with increasing employment — see below.)
The PCS report critically assessed a number of supposed technological fixes proposed by industry employers, for instance use of different fuels — which has since, under the name “Sustainable Aviation Fuels”, become an even more favoured “solution” of industry and government, despite remaining what the report called both “discredited” and “a distraction”.
It considered various forms of taxing the chronically under-taxed aviation sector, including from standpoints of curbing air traffic, financial progressiveness and use of funds raised, emphasising channelling funds into green measures such as expanding public transport.
Climate jobs
In general the report was most enthusiastic about the kind of solutions it grouped under the heading of “Climate jobs”. It outlined three broad strands: making existing jobs greener through incremental changes such as eliminating waste and reforming working patterns and travel arrangements; making existing jobs greener through considerably different procedures and operational structures, i.e. more radically transforming the industry; and creating jobs in alternative “green” sectors.
The second plank could allow the creation of large numbers of new jobs within aviation. As Safe Landing explained more recently: “a lot of work [is] required to transform aviation from high- to low-emissions: developing new technology, reconfiguring airports and re-training staff within the sector. For example, if there is a significant reduction in fast, long-haul travel in large aircraft, this may be replaced by shorter-range travel in smaller electric or hydrogen aircraft.”
The PCS authors emphasised progressing in the first strand through workplace-level collective bargaining — what is now being called “green bargaining” — on the basis of expanded and better organised union membership; in the second through a mix of workplace and wider green bargaining and government policies and action; and in the third primarily through political action.
In terms of alternative jobs, the report again particularly emphasised creating jobs in public transport, because of the contribution to tackling climate change as well as social justice.
On multiple more purely economic axes too, including both general economic benefits and job creation specifically, investment in rail is a much better way of expanding transport links than expanding aviation. The 2008 RMT Who Says There’s No Alternative? report found that creating new high speed inter-city rail links, even if requiring large initial investment, would eventually generate many times greater benefits than expanding Heathrow. Investment in buses is, obviously, also badly needed.
Public ownership
The 2013 PCS report emphasised the kind of policies it sketched out would not flourish without “greater regulation, international co-operation and indeed public ownership” — with “direct public ownership… by far the quickest way to drive investment towards desirable and social and environmental outcomes”.
Seven years later the union’s Aviation Democracy pamphlet, by its former Aviation Group president Tahir Latif and climate change policy officer Sam Mason, set out sharper positions on some issues of controversy, such as air traffic expansion, and made a more emphatic and detailed case for comprehensive public ownership in aviation. It also profiled in some detail various aspects of the aviation industry, its workforce and the issues they face, providing an informative overview of the sector.
By that time the industry had gone through multiple severe crises, including the existential crisis of the pandemic and the ever more pressing one caused by the impacts of climate change. Aviation Democracy made the likelihood of more and more frequent such crises central to arguments against market-driven expansion of the industry and for public ownership.
Also published in 2020, the A Green New Deal for Gatwick report looked specifically at the impact of the pandemic in an area of the UK heavily over-reliant on aviation — with aviation-linked jobs accounting for one twelfth in the “Gatwick Diamond” of West Sussex and East Surrey and a third in the borough of Crawley. Advocating a public sector-led diversification of the local economy, the report expanded the focus on alternative jobs to consider care, health, education and other public service work alongside public transport.
For socialists and trade unionists who want to develop ideas for the future of this economically, politically and climate-pivotal sector, all these publications are worth reading.
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