It is only a matter of time before budget airlines start charging us for the air we breathe at 30,000 feet. Once a glamorous (albeit elitist) experience where you could stretch your legs and languish with a flute of fizz while whooshing through the sky, flying today is a late capitalist hellscape.

Each year, airline travel seems to get worse. For both workers and passengers. As always, the chaos hits a crescendo in the summer months when all the kiddos are off school and those of us lucky enough to leave town for a while flock to the airport in droves.

July is an especially chaotic month for flying. It makes it the perfect time for workers to take a stand against staff shortages, low wages and poor working conditions. At the beginning of the month, air traffic controllers in France walked out for two days on July 3 and 4, citing low staffing levels and "toxic and authoritarian" management.

I was sitting in my cramped little window seat on board a Ryanair flight, anxiously rubbing the Saint Christopher around my neck, when the apologetic pilot announced to passengers that we might be stuck on the tarmac for several hours waiting for a slot due to airspace capacity restrictions. Flying is a privilege, I remind myself. But it sure doesn’t feel like an honour these days.

Between the illusion of low-cost ticket prices based on the infuriating strategy of “unbundling” to the industrial action-inducing conditions for aviation workers across Europe and the UK, has flying ever been this bad?

French air traffic controllers were not the only workers taking strike action this month. In Finland, industrial action rocked Finnair and Helsinki Airport across........

© Herald Scotland