“when in fact the airline opted to toss off paying passengers so that four employees could enjoy free travel.”
Weren’t they staff that were needed to work another flight?
I don’t think this was some fun free travel perk. They were going to work.
They were reportedly flight crew for a job the NEXT day. Route them through multiple cities if necessary. Put them on separate planes if necessary. If the passenger can be shifted to another plane, so can that non-working crew (”oh, it’s in my contract, you can’t do that to me!”)
Customers pay in advance for a service. The airline has renegged on that agreement. Federal Trade Commission can be brought into this as it is an interstate wired sale.
Put “clauses” in the “agreement” if you like, but you can put a sign on your icy sidewalk (that you refuse to clean) that you aren’t responsible for injuries and it still won’t protect you.
Imagine you're seated at a restaurant. You reserved a table ahead of time, and they restaurant made you pay for your meal up front. You order when the waiter comes up and tells you to get up and leave because the manager wants to interview a sous chef at your table. They offer you a gift certificate at the dunkin' donuts next door, but you refuse, pointing out that you've already paid and have been seated. The bouncer comes over and beats the crap out of you.
Whether the restaurant is right or wrong is immaterial. It's bad for business.
If United goes belly up, they brought it on themselves.
If the four airline people were flight crew, the agents at the gate would have known about them in advance. They could have bumped four passengers pre-boarding, which would have prevented the entire scene.
There is a point where United should have decided that "the ship had sailed" and made other arrangements. For example, what if the plane had backed out and was about to start to taxi? Would they have re-parked it in order to pull off 4 passengers in order to put their crew on board? If not, what would they have done? I think they probably would have let it go and they would have made other arrangements. Once everyone had boarded, and there were no takers, they should have regarded the plane as already started on its flight. Instead, they chose to immolate themselves as a company.
Phrased that way, that seems almost trivial.
The relevant fact is that hundreds of other passengers were relying on their ability to get to work.