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The European Union is under increasing pressure to further ease rules on airport take-off and landing slots to cut the number of “ghost flights” airlines are running to retain them.

Carriers say the requirement for them to use 50% of their slots — down from 80% in pre-pandemic days — or lose them is forcing them to operate empty or half-empty flights.

A sluggish return to air travel, as travelers shrink away from the omicron COVID variant and quickly changing rules for passengers, is dragging out the practice longer than they planned.

Belgium’s Brussels Airlines, for instance, says it will have to operate 3,000 under-capacity flights up to the end of March.

Its parent company Lufthansa warned last month it expected it would have to run 18,000 “pointless flights” over the European winter.

Belgium’s transport minister, Georges Gilkinet, has written to the European Commission urging it to loosen the slot rules, arguing the consequences run counter to the EU’s carbon-neutral ambitions.

The current reduced quotas were introduced in March last year in a nod to the hardship airlines faced as COVID washed over Europe for a second year running, shriveling passenger numbers.

In December, the commission said the 50% threshold would be raised to 64% for this year’s April-to-November summer flight season.

“Despite our urgings for more flexibility at the time, the EU approved a 50%-use rule for every flight schedule/frequency held for the winter. This has clearly been unrealistic in the EU this winter against the backdrop of the current crisis,” a spokesperson for the International Air Transport Association (IATA) told AFP.

He said the commission needed to show more “flexibility … given the significant drop in passengers and impact of omicron numbers on crewing planned schedules.”

But a commission spokesperson on Wednesday said the EU executive believed “the overall reduced consumer demand… is already reflected in a much-reduced rate of 50% compared to the usual 80%-use rate rule.”

The spokesperson, Daniel Ferrie, said: “The Commission expects that operated flights follow consumer demand and offer much needed continued air connectivity to citizens.” 

 
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At the start of 2022 most measures show the U.S. economy is booming, with an unemployment rate that is approaching record lows and a demand for goods that has imports from the rest of the world surging.

On Friday, the Labor Department announced that the unemployment rate had fallen to 3.9% in December, even as the economy produced a smaller-than-expected increase of 199,000 new jobs. The report came a day after the Commerce Department announced that U.S. imports in November had increased by 4.6% over the previous month to $304.4 billion.

The rising level of imports contributed to a trade deficit of $80.2 billion for the month, which is close to the record high of $81.4 billion set in September. While a large trade deficit is seen as a negative by many, particularly former President Donald Trump, who went to great lengths to close the gap between imports and exports, economists say it points to a U.S. economy that is leading the global recovery from the pandemic-induced recession.

“When we do better than everybody else, we get a bigger trade deficit,” said economist Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

US as economic engine

It’s a popular misconception that a trade deficit is a sign of bad economic times in the United States, Hufbauer told VOA. “Not at all. It’s an indicator of great times in the U.S., relative to other countries. And that’s exactly where we are. We’re doing very well, relative to other countries, so the dollar tends to be stronger, that tends to increase the trade deficit, because demand is greater.”

The benefits of a strong U.S. economy are felt around the world, as other countries find U.S. consumers eager to purchase their goods.

China, as usual, was the largest net beneficiary of the U.S. trade deficit, selling U.S. consumers $28.4 billion more than it purchased. The U.S. ran a significant trade deficit with other trade partners as well, including the European Union, at $19.4 billion; Mexico, at $11 billion; Germany, at $6.1 billion; and Canada, at $5.4 billion.

The U.S. runs a trade surplus with only a few partners. The largest is a $4.5 billion surplus with all of Central and South America. The only other surpluses of $1 billion or more are with Hong Kong, at $1.6 billion, and Brazil, at $1.0 billion.

Job growth continues

The monthly jobs report from the Department of Labor, released Friday, told a similar story of an economy that continues to demonstrate a strong recovery from the pandemic recession. The 199,000 figure for the month of December was lower than expected but contributed to an average of about 537,000 jobs per month over all of 2021.

All told, the unemployment rate fell from 6.4% at the beginning of the year to 3.9% in December.

Not all of the decline in unemployment can be attributed to job growth. Millions of American workers dropped out of the labor force, largely as a result of the pandemic. That means that even though the unemployment rate is low, there are still about 3.6 million fewer workers in the U.S. than there were in the months prior to the beginning of the pandemic.

“We still have aways to go in terms of absorbing the labor force, and people who’ve left the labor force, as well as population growth, but it’s certainly a positive sign,” said Elise Gould, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.

On a more sobering note, the report revealed that when it comes to employment, the economic recovery has not been evenly distributed. From November to December, the unemployment rate among Black Americans rose from 6.1% to 6.5%. The problem is particularly acute among Black women, who face an unemployment rate of 5.6%, double the rate of white women.

Omicron is wild card

What the most recent economic data cannot yet tell us is the degree to which the surging omicron variant of the coronavirus has had on U.S. employment. The Labor Department uses a “reference week” each month when calculating job numbers, and the reference week in December was unusually early, encompassing Dec. 5-11, before the omicron surge began in earnest.

“Most of it happened in the second half of the month,” Gould told VOA. “So, it’s really not being reflected here at all. On February 4, when the January data comes out, I’m sure we will see a pretty big impact — hopefully a short-lived one — but probably a significant impact on the labor market.” 

 
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U.S. employers added 199,000 new jobs in December, 50,000 fewer than November, the Labor Department reported Friday, as business continue to struggle to fill vacancies due to American workers’ reluctance to return to the workforce during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the hiring slowdown, December’s jobless rate fell to a healthy 3.9% — a 22-month low — from November’s 4.2%.

December’s modest jobs gains belie the fact that 2021 was one of the best years for U.S. workers in decades, even though the pandemic caused the previous year to be one of the job market’s worst since the government began tracking hiring in 1939.

A monthly average of 537,000 jobs were added to the economy in 2021, the Labor Department said Friday, and a record 6.4 million jobs were created”America is back to work,” President Biden declared Friday before reporters at the White House. “The increase in Americans joining the labor force was the fastest this year of any year since 1996.”

Companies posted a record high number of job vacancies in 2021 and offered sharply higher pay to try to attract and retain employees, a record number of whom quit their jobs in search of higher-quality positions.

Biden said U.S. workers saw their wages increase last year by nearly 16%, “the highest in history.”

“Wage gains for all workers who are not supervisors went up more in 2021 than any year in four decades. There’s been a lot of press coverage of people quitting their jobs,” Biden said. “Well, today’s report tells you why: Americans are moving up to better jobs with better pay, with better benefits. That’s why they’re quitting their jobs.”

December’s report reflects the state of the economy early in the month, before the highly contagious omicron variant sickened millions of people in the U.S., forcing the cancellation of thousands of commercial flights and leading to reduced traffic at bars and restaurants and some school closures.

Many economists believe job growth may slow in January and possibly in February because of the omicron outbreak, which has forced millions of sick workers to quarantine at home, potentially disrupting employers, including hospitals, airlines and ski resorts.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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