Remember the days when traveling was relaxing, exciting? Those memories have been challenged in recent weeks by the chaos experienced at airports around the world, particularly in North America and Europe. A surge of summer passengers, eager and waiting to travel since the onset of the pandemic, has been confronted with widespread understaffing due to Covid-19 layoffs which have put pressure on airports and airlines.
Once considered redundant, travel industry workers who were laid off are now reluctant to return to jobs due to low wages, job insecurity, and poor working conditions. As a result of the lack of human resources globally, thousands of passengers have missed boarding calls and flights while waiting in nightmare queues, and often their luggage has been delayed or lost. And if all this is not enough, many airline staff, including pilots, are protesting over fatigue, stress, and staff shortages. Due to the lack of manpower, airlines around the world have canceled thousands of flights and many more cancellations are expected throughout the holiday season.
Whoever decided to initiate the wave of mass layoffs in the days of the pandemic should have also considered how to recruit and train new workers when they would again be needed. After all, the expectation was known well in advance since tens of thousands had already talked about a vacation abroad the day after the travel restrictions were lifted. So why didn’t they get organized in advance to provide services to the traveling public?
The coronavirus has accustomed us to a new quality of life–to working from home in comfortable conditions, to seeing that it is possible to get by with less, so now the low salaries offered in the industry provide little incentive to return to work.
In the short run, better wages for employees would spur recruitment, but in the long run, this will not truly satisfy employee desires. The very fact that this is a worldwide phenomenon suggests that it is a fundamental human problem that might even be called the “plague of laziness.”
It is forbidden to disconnect between cause and effect. During the pandemic period people changed from within. Their desires and requirements have grown, so that today they demand more comfort and are unwilling to make large efforts without being paid appropriately. This is the evolving trend in human society, and it is an expression of continuing development that requires a new fulfillment.
In the end, the international chaos in the aviation industry reveals how unorganized we are on a social level. This is only a sample of the situation that exists in all the other industries in the economy. We are disorganized across the board, while the crisis has not yet reached its peak. As long as we do not settle the problems the suffering and frustration will intensify to the point that we will no longer contain them, then surely a comprehensive change will be forced upon us.
The lack of connection between us, and the lack of awareness of our human nature particularly as a result of the pandemic, reveal the simple fact that we are no longer able to even enjoy even the short vacations which were taken for granted not long ago.
If we do not wake up, the situation will only get worse. Human nature does not freeze its yeast; the desire to receive pleasure will force people to demand more and more. At the same time, we naturally become more lazy, selfish, and greedy. In the same way that there are no flights now, tomorrow there will be no trains, hotels, restaurants and what not, so that we will have to acknowledge in our flesh that change is mandatory.
Large companies in the economy need to implement an ongoing process of education to raise awareness of the fact that we live in one single interconnected natural system in which humanity is interdependent.
This very initial understanding from our education will develop within us a new attitude toward life, teaching us how to direct our egoistic nature to harmonize with conditions of interdependence and mutual guarantee. Out of the corrected and improved relationships between us we will be able to easily motivate workers and propel all the systems in the economy to avoid future bumpy rides in our society.
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