Yahoo! News - Worker Shortage Snarls U.S. Airways Flights
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bankrupt US Airways late Saturday blamed more than 300 canceled flights and thousands of pieces of stranded luggage on the aftereffects of a heavy winter storm and large numbers of workers who called in sick during the crucial holiday travel period.

The disruption to thousands of travelers on troubled US Airways had the carrier scrambling and caught the attention of the U.S. Transportation Department, which told the airline to quickly straighten out its operations and its labor shortages.

The company and unions say there was no organized "sick out," but workers at the seventh-largest domestic airline are bitter about huge wage and benefit cuts the company says are needed for the airline to survive. They are also angry at how the company has been managed through two bankruptcies in two years.

I had a dream last night about a situation where all the low wage workers in America went on "strike"- nobody came to work at the fast food, the grocery, retail, housekeeping, etc etc, and the country was practically shut down. Funny this story came up- I did not see the news except for a brief bit of 13 local at 6, and they were doing the typical story of "people who work on Christmas". Maybe that's what gave me the idea.