The price of access

On December 23, 2024, Delta Air Lines suspended its specialty airport services for all 535 members of Congress. The red carpet treatment, the escorts, the red coat concierge service, all of it gone, pending TSA funding restoration. One press release. One afternoon. Done.

The day before that announcement, December 22, checkpoint disruptions from unpaid TSA officers had caused delays for 1.2 million passengers across major U.S. airports. One point two million people standing in lines, taking off their shoes, waiting, while the people responsible for their safety were working without pay because Congress couldn’t pass a budget. TSA unions had been asking for staffing protections and funding guarantees for over twenty years. Two decades of testimony, of organizing, of going through every correct channel. They got nothing.

Delta asked once.

I posted about this a few days ago and the replies split almost perfectly in half. One half said: good, at least someone’s doing something. The other half said I was being unfair to Delta, that they were just protecting their own operations, that checkpoint chaos is bad for airlines too. Both of those things can be true at the same time and still not touch what I was actually saying.

what leverage costs

The counterargument is that Delta wasn’t making a power play, they were protecting mutual interests. Air travel breaks down without functional airport security. Of course the airlines want TSA funded. Of course they’d pressure Congress. This is just corporate self-interest aligning with public good, the market working as intended.

Fine. Accept all of that. Now ask why the people who actually staff those checkpoints, who work unpaid during shutdowns, who have been asking for the same outcome for twenty years, couldn’t make it happen. The answer isn’t that unions didn’t try hard enough. The answer is that the system assigns different weights to different voices, and a Delta press release carries more weight than a decade of union testimony, and we’ve decided that’s normal.

The corrosive part isn’t that Delta has power. It’s that we’ve built a world where access to that kind of leverage is the whole ballgame, and then we pretend the game is fair.

On December 24, the day after Delta’s announcement, the CEOs of American, United, Southwest, JetBlue, and Alaska all joined a unified statement demanding TSA funding restoration. Six major airline CEOs, one joint statement, Christmas Eve. Compare that coordination, that speed, that result, to what TSA workers got from two decades of organized labor action. The comparison isn’t subtle.

the invisible tax

There’s a related thing I’ve been thinking about, less obviously connected but I think it’s the same machine.

A post I wrote last week about what some people call the “race tax” got more traction than I expected, probably because it named something a lot of people already knew but hadn’t seen quantified. Black professionals spend 2 to 7 extra hours per week, according to 2024 internal corporate survey data, on DEI work, mentorship, and visibility labor that their white peers simply don’t do. That’s 100 to 350 unpaid hours a year. Not volunteered. Expected. Structurally required if you want to be seen as a team player, a leader, someone who “gives back.”

The connection to the Delta story is this: both situations involve a group of people being asked to perform labor that another group doesn’t have to perform, in exchange for access that the second group gets automatically. TSA workers perform the labor of keeping airports safe and get told their funding is discretionary. Black professionals perform the labor of holding organizations together across racial fault lines and get told it’s part of their personal brand. Delta performs the labor of threatening to inconvenience Congress and gets immediate results.

The question of who gets to convert their effort into power is not random. It follows very clear lines.

the moat

The third piece of this, the one that’s been sitting in my drafts longest, is about AI and who gets to benefit from it.

I wrote something about tenure being the AI moat nobody talks about. What I meant was this: the people who can automate their jobs without consequence are the people who already have job security. A tenured engineer at Google can build a tool that eliminates three junior roles and get promoted for it. The junior roles were eliminated because of “budget” anyway, so the automation just formalizes what was already decided. Google’s AI-first restructuring in Q4 2024 cut over 1,000 non-tenured positions. The people whose jobs disappeared weren’t consulted about the automation that replaced them. They weren’t offered the tenure that would have let them be the ones doing the automating.

This is the same logic as the Delta story, just wearing a different costume. The people with existing access use that access to consolidate more. The people without it watch the consolidation happen and are told this is progress.

The tech industry version of “Delta asked once and got what unions couldn’t get in twenty years” is: the people who already had job security used AI to make their positions more secure, while the people who never had job security watched those same roles get automated out of existence. Automation isn’t neutral. It lands differently depending on where you’re standing when it arrives.

what this is actually about

All three of these things, the Delta leverage story, the race tax, the AI moat, are versions of the same observation. The system isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. It assigns power to those who already have it, extracts labor from those who don’t, and then offers explanations that make each individual instance seem reasonable.

Delta was protecting its operational interests. Fine. The “race tax” is just mentorship and community building. Fine. AI is just efficiency. Fine.

Each one is defensible in isolation. Together they describe a world where the price of access is set in advance, set differently for different people, by people who will never call it what it is.

TSA unions understood this. They just didn’t have a red coat service to suspend.