True (re: overage all thruout travel industry). But, as one blogger pointed out, you don't see a prominent hotel chain dragging a guy out of a room ("re-accommodate") in order to accommodate a hotel industry sales exec who just arrived & needs a room.
The airline industry expects travelers to plan their trips down to a "T"; they better do it themselves w/plans and contingency plans as to how they are going to shuttle their team members around...and this should be easiest to do when it comes to their Hub HQ city.
Apparently the CEO negotiated a new contract last August with the airline workers' union, and gave them lots of goodies. Here's an interesting/ironic tidbit (in reference to the United/Continental merger) from an article about that:
"Without a union contract, United couldn't update and integrate the computers that schedule flights and crews’ schedules. They were running two separate scheduling systems. As a result, United had to build in costly extra trips to move planes and flight attendants around the country."
http://www.businessinsider.com/united-airlines-ceo-oscar-munoz-recovery-2017-2
I agree completely. As others have said, usually once you are on the plane, you are good to go. They will make the offers at the gate for the free flight credits before boarding to accommodate the over-booking. Their first mistake was waiting to get on the plane. The second was forcing people against their will. The third is the treatment by the security team, and above all displacing paying customers in this manner for employees. The fact that they had either pilots or crew that needed to be somewhere is not the passengers problem. Should they have gotten volunteers, that would be one thing. I might take $1000 in free vouchers to fly home the next morning. To create this for their own business logistics is bad. They needed to either get them on another plane or find replacements from elsewhere. Should have have booked 4 people onto the plane who were paying customers, then they have a conundrum of who gets displaced among the customers. That’s not good, but this is horrific all-around.