If anyone still does not understand why we need to unionize after reading Barger's opinion below, than you are truly lost.
"The auto industry, the steel industry – these mature industries in the United States – they're healthy now because of foreign ownership, because of not being protected," he says. "Why are we sitting here with a statute that's 70 years old now?" JetBlue is a non-union company, just like Ryanair is, and Barger says that if it was a union firm, its model simply wouldn't work. It wouldn't have the freedom, he argues, to expand as it wished and to do things that separate it from older carriers.
He admires Scandinavian airline Norwegian, which has created an enormous hullabaloo by basing its long-haul arm in Dublin to give it rights to fly from the EU to the United States. US aviation unions have been waging an all-out battle in an effort to prevent the airline from being able to service US routes while being based in Ireland. They have claimed it's basing itself outside Norway so it can hire cheaper pilots and crew from Asia, something the airline denies.
In a recent opinion piece in a Florida newspaper, the head of Norwegian's long-haul arm, Bjorn Kjos, said the airline is "taking on the big guys to offer everyone affordable flights across the Atlantic".
"I applaud what they're attempting to do," says Barger, who concedes that even JetBlue may one day be competing with Norwegian's international arm. "I look at this rhetoric we're seeing in the United States with regard to what Norwegian is attempting to do and wait a minute, why is it the next idea is bad? Are we that threatened by a couple of (Boeing) 787s starting a service from Gatwick to Fort Lauderdale or to Kennedy?"