Airlines, airports and unions: Not always a happy mixture

The protectionist nature of airline regulation encourages union activism. The airline business is by definition riddled with protectionism from the ground up. The system devised 75 years ago is basically unchanged and reflects many of the needs of that immediate post-war world. Basically all countries wanted to have the right to operate their own airlines so that they could be connected internationally to the points they needed to travel to and from.