Imagine checking in for a flight with your two teenage children. At the counter, you are told that your youngest teenager’s suitcase is two kilograms over the limit. You get slapped with a $75 penalty for their excess luggage.

This penalty feels arbitrary and unfair. The youngest weighs about 45 kg, and their luggage weighs 25 kg, making their total payload on the flight 70 kg.

Their older sibling, on the other hand, weighs 65 kg, and has brought 23 kg of luggage to check in. Their total weight is higher—88 kg—yet they receive no penalty.

Obviously, things aren’t that simple. Charging passengers based on their weight is highly controversial for many reasons. But that hasn’t stopped some airlines experimenting with such policies.

Imagine checking in for your flight only to have the staff tell you to purchase an extra seat as you are a plus-sized passenger. You feel discriminated against because you are using the same service as other passengers and your weight is beyond your control.

But despite the lived experience of many and hot debate in the media, there has not been a formal study into what passengers themselves think about this matter.

Our recently published research examined air passengers’ views on alternative airfare policies to understand whether the public finds them acceptable and what ethical considerations determine their views.

Though we found a range of ethical contradictions, most travelers were guided by self-interest.

A controversial but important topic

The issue of whether airlines should weigh passengers is an ethical minefield with no easy answers.

Despite its sensitivity, the aviation industry can’t ignore passenger weight. Airlines intermittently undertake passenger weight surveys as they need to accurately calculate payload to ensure flight safety and estimate fuel consumption.

The evidence shows passengers are getting heavier. Airlines including the now-defunct Samoa Air and Hawaiian Airlines have taken things one step further and experimented with weighing passengers regularly.

Samoa Air, for example, became the first airline to introduce a “pay-as-you-weigh” policy, where the cost of your ticket was directly proportional to the combined weight of you and your luggage.

In contrast, Canada has now long had a “one person, one fare” policy. It is prohibited and deemed discriminatory to force passengers living with a disability to purchase a second seat for themselves if they require one, including those with functional disabilities due to obesity.

To complicate matters further, the issue of passenger and luggage weight is not only ethical and financial, but also environmental. More weight on an aircraft leads to more jet fuel being burned and more carbon emissions.

About 5% of human-driven climate change can be attributed to aviation, and the industry faces enormous pressure to reduce fuel consumption while it waits for low carbon substitutes to become available.

What do passengers actually think?

To get a better sense of how the public actually feels about this issue, we surveyed 1,012 US travelers of different weights, presenting them with three alternatives:

• standard policy—currently the most widely used policy with passengers paying a standard price, irrespective of their weight
• threshold policy—passengers are penalized if they are over a threshold weight
• unit of body weight policy—passengers pay a personalized price based on their own body weight, per each pound.

The standard policy was the most acceptable for participants of differing weight, although the heavier the passenger, the more they preferred the standard policy. This can be partially explained by status quo bias. Generally, people are likely to choose a familiar answer.

The threshold policy was the least acceptable. This policy was seen to violate established social norms and be generally less fair.

The unit of body weight policy was preferred to the threshold policy, although participants raised concerns about whether it would be accepted by society.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that self-interest played a clear role in determining whether respondents considered a policy acceptable.

Younger, male, financially well-off travelers with lower personal weight generally found the alternative policies more acceptable.

An ethical conflict

Alternative airfare policies that are based on passenger weight bring environmental and ethical concerns into conflict. Obviously, the effect isn’t from any one traveler, in particular, but averages over the entire industry.

Interestingly, respondents that were more concerned about the environment—”ecocentric”—preferred air fare policies that would reduce carbon emissions. This made them more open to the controversial alternatives.

While the threshold policy was clearly rejected by many respondents as discriminatory, environmental concern played a role in the level of acceptance of the unit of body weight policy.

It’s important to apply a critical lens here. These ecocentric travelers were also generally younger and had lower personal weights, so many would benefit from the alternative policies financially.

For policymakers overall, our study suggests that when it comes to controversial ticketing policies, the public is more likely to be swayed by self-interest than anything else.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Boeing and its largest union are entering the last week of contract negotiations before a threatened strike by more than 30,000 workers who build the planes that carry millions of airline passengers every year.

A walkout would add to the headwinds facing Boeing, which is hurtling toward a sixth straight money-losing year and just hired a new CEO to turn things around.

The regional branch of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers says the two sides are far apart on wages, health care and job security. The union of started out seeking pay raises of more than 40% over three years, although “that’s probably not where we’re going to end up,” IAM District 751 President Jon Holden said last week.

The union has scheduled a two-part election for Thursday, with voting at more than a half-dozen locations in Washington state and one in Southern California. Workers will vote on Boeing’s last contract offer and whether to authorize a strike if the offer is rejected. A walkout could begin by Friday morning.

A straw vote in July to gauge support for a strike passed with 99.99% support, according to the union.

“What we are asking for is reasonable,” Holden said in an interview. “We need to get more wages to address the very low increases over the last 10 years, massive inflation, massive cost-shift on health care. We are trying to reach an agreement, but (union members) are ready to take action if we don’t get there.”

Holden said the union has a strike fund in the millions and isn’t afraid to tap it.

Boeing declined to make an executive available to discuss the labor negotiations. A spokesperson provided a one-sentence statement.

“We’re confident we can reach a deal that balances the needs of our employees and the business realities we face as a company,” the statement said.

Boeing’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, has tried to take a conciliatory posture toward labor. He is working in Seattle, to be near the factories where the company builds most of its commercial airplanes, instead of at headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. He walked the floor of the 737 Max plant during his first day on the job.

“He understands that they are basically contentious relationships with the union, and he wants to make those relationships better,” TD Cowen aerospace analyst Cai von Rumohr said.

Ortberg already has a long to-do list. The new CEO will try to fix Boeing’s aircraft-manufacturing process, gain regulatory approval for the long-delayed 777X jumbo jet, limit damage from over-budget government contracts, pay down $45 billion in net debt, and absorb Spirit AeroSystems, the money-losing key supplier that Boeing just bought for $4.7 billion.

Ortberg’s toughest job will be restoring Boeing’s reputation for quality, which was crushed after two 737 Max jets crashed less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people, and took another big hit when a door plug blew off a Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.

Unlike strikes at airlines, which are very rare, a walkout at Boeing would not have an immediate effect on consumers. It would not result in any canceled flights. It would, however, shut down production and leave Boeing with no jets to deliver to the airlines that ordered them.

“During a strike, they don’t work on planes, they don’t deliver planes,” von Rumohr said. Aircraft makers typically get about 60% of the purchase price on delivery, “so not delivering planes has a massive impact on your cash in-flow, and your costs probably continue on.”

An eight-week strike in 2008, the longest at Boeing since a 10-week walkout in 1995, cost the company about $100 million a day in deferred revenue.

Meeting the union’s wage demand would cost Boeing $1.5 billion in cash, which is “a small price to pay versus a strike,” Jefferies aerospace analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu said. In a note to clients, she estimated a strike would cost the company about $3 billion, a calculation based on the impact of the 2008 strike plus inflation and current airplane-production rates.

Boeing is in far worse financial shape than it was in 2008. The company has lost $27 billion since the start of 2019, around the time that its best-selling plane, the 737 Max, was grounded worldwide after the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Revenue is down, debt is up.

Boeing’s greatest strength is that is remains one of the world’s two leading manufacturers of airline jets, forming a duopoly with Europe’s Airbus. Boeing has a huge backlog of orders, which it values at more than $500 billion.

The company’s defense and space business is a major government contractor, although that business too is struggling. Its most recent setback was NASA’s decision to use SpaceX instead of Boeing’s Starliner capsule to bring two astronauts home from the international space station.

Job security is emerging as a key issue in the current negotiations. The union is still seething over the loss of work on the 787 Dreamliner, a large, two-aisle jetliner that is assembled by nonunion Boeing workers in South Carolina. The IAM wants a guarantee its members will keep the work they have and that the union will represent the workers who build Boeing’s next airliner.

That plane isn’t even on the drawing board yet, and production could be a decade or more away. It is vital to IAM, however, because one-third of the union’s members at Boeing—more than 10,000 people—work on the 737 Max, which the new plane would replace.

The union president said Boeing has been in “free fall” for more than a year, and he acknowledged the company faces huge and costly challenges. Despite all that, he said, the union is in good position to win a strong contract.

“All employers are searching for skilled labor, and we have it,” Holden said. “This company has a massive backlog of over 5,000 airplanes to build and deliver, so we are in high demand right now. That’s our leverage.”

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

A blockbuster new Chinese video game hailed as a milestone for the country’s gaming industry has put an unexpected spotlight on longstanding claims of rampant sexism in China’s male-dominated gaming culture.

While some gamers are basking in the runaway success of the action-adventure title “Black Myth: Wukong,” others are voicing their complaints about sexism in Chinese gaming and lodging allegations against the game’s Shenzhen-based developer, Game Science, that it posted offensive messages online.

Critics posted screenshots of the messages on Chinese social media platform Weibo, with one compilation receiving over 400,000 likes. One of the posts that critics say came from founder Feng Ji uses descriptions of oral sex as a metaphor for the positive responses about the game’s promotional video. Other examples include lewd recruiting posters.

AP was not able to independently verify the screenshots, though gamers interviewed reported seeing the posts. Game Science did not respond to an email seeking comment and hasn’t publicly commented on the controversy.

The criticism reflects simmering anger among Chinese women in the industry who say they have long been targeted by misogynistic remarks and behavior.

Gender inequality is a global problem in the heavily male-dominated gaming industry. Despite making up almost half of the gamers globally, women made up only about 22% of the gaming industry workforce in 2020, according to Women in Games, a United Kingdom-based organization.

Skylar Hu, the only woman on her game engineering team of over 20 people, said her male colleagues often posted sexual jokes in work chat groups. She said when she told offenders to stop, her messages were ignored.

“Offensive jokes are so common and explicit,” Hu, 23, said in a phone interview, speaking on condition she be cited by her English name out of concern for her safety online.

For Jessica Hua, a former video game operation manager, controversy over the game reminded her of the toxic environment she experienced as a woman in the game industry.

“A lot of people think it’s just kidding around. But I cannot accept such misogynistic remarks,” said Hua. “I take it quite seriously.”

“Black Myth: Wukong” is China’s first-ever AAA game, a designation for big-budget productions akin to A-list movies. The game made history when over 2.4 million people played the game simultaneously online, breaking the record for most-played single-player game on Steam, a major online gaming platform. Three days after the game’s debut, over 10 million copies had been sold.

Many in the Chinese gaming industry say they regard the game as a point of national pride, promoting Chinese culture and challenging Western dominance in the industry.

“There is no doubt that this is a milestone in the Chinese gaming industry,” said Feng Xu, secretary of the Chengdu Cyber Game Industry Association. “It’s exporting authentic Chinese culture by introducing Monkey King to the world.”

China, which famously imposed limits on how long kids can play video games and sought to curtail excessive spending on online gaming, has shown full support for “Black Myth.” The government of China’s northwestern Shanxi province collaborated with the game’s developer to promote local tourism. State media have also published a series of articles praising the game.

Feng Xu says he doesn’t think the allegations against Game Science would have much impact on the game’s success. “Political correctness has nothing to do with the game,” he said. “We gamers only play the games, and we only care if the game is good and fun.”

Others say it was only a matter of time before addressing sexism in Chinese gaming culture gained more traction.

“Most game creators are men. You can see in a lot of games women are usually unnecessarily sexy and objectified,” said Ashley Li, a cultural critic and game enthusiast. “But I think this will gradually change in the future. We need to give it some time.”

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.