The starting point for airline trip discomforts is on Wall Street

When an unlucky passenger was violently dragged off a full United Airlines flight in Chicago in April, setting off a public-relations nightmare for the company, the blame naturally fell on the cabin crew, police and eventually airline executives.

But ultimately, the episode was set in motion elsewhere — on Wall Street.

Relentless pressure on corporate America is creating an increasingly Dickensian experience for many consumers as companies focus on maximizing profit.

Intense pressure today

And nowhere is the trend as stark as in the airline industry, whose service is delivered in an aluminum tube packed with up to four different classes, cheek by jowl, 35,000 feet in the air. Rich bonus packages for top executives are now largely tied to short-term income targets and fatter profit margins instead of customer service.

“There’s always been pressure from Wall Street,” said Robert Dilenschneider, a veteran public relations executive who advises companies and chief executives on strategic communications. “But I’ve been watching this for 30 years, and it’s never been as intense as it is today.”

Rich bonus packages for top executives are now largely tied to short-term income targets and fatter profit margins instead of customer service. Of course, bolstering profits — and in turn, stock prices — has always been a big part of management’s responsibility to shareholders, but making it virtually the only criterion for executive pay is new.

Five years ago, American Airlines factored in ontime arrivals, lost baggage and consumer complaints to help calculate annual incentive payments for top management. Today, these bonuses are based exclusively on the company’s pretax income and cost savings.

United also has scaled back bonuses linked to reliability and customer satisfaction for senior executives in recent years. But in the wake of what happened in April, bonuses “will be made more comprehensively subject to progress in 2017 on significant improvement in the customer experience,” the company said in a financial filing.

“Fifteen years ago, airlines competed with each other over who could buy the most planes or have the most routes,” said Jamie Baker, a top airline industry analyst at JPMorgan Chase. “Executives are just as competitive today, but it’s about who can achieve an investment-grade rating first, who can be a component in the S&P 500, and who has better returns for investors.”

These new incentives also partly explain why airlines are packing seats more densely.

“Densification is driven by the desire to sweat the assets and generate revenues without having to commit capital to building new planes,” Baker said.

The pressure is especially brutal in the industry because the key expense, fuel, is for the most part beyond management control.