Airline’s Loyalty Flies Like A Rock

Picture them in their boardroom last week, the executives who run Arizona-based America West Airlines.

I see them sipping coffee from fine china, admiring their silk suits and grinning at the prospect of fat bonuses for laying off 500 loyal employees. Employees who stuck with America West through its bankruptcy. Employees who took pay cuts to help pull America West from the abyss, buying into the notion their sacrifices would help the company succeed.

Employees who made sacrifices and now have been sacrificed.

I picture the executives who run America West planning what they’d say when some writer who doesn’t understand big business asked why a company calling itself our “hometown airline” would fire 500 of our friends and neighbors a few weeks before Christmas. A necessary business decision, the company said.

I picture the executives who run America West shaking their heads sympathetically and saying, “We know this is a difficult time of year for us to do this, but then again, there really is no good time to lay people off.”

Maybe that’s true. But there are genuinely bad times to do such a thing. And the worst time of all is just before Christmas.

Then again, maybe it was a necessary business decision.

After all, America West has laid off people before. Hundreds of them.

But that was a few years ago, when the company was in trouble. This summer, the airline reported quarterly earnings of $21 million and announced it had more than $300 million in cash reserves.

With those numbers, you might expect generous Christmas bonuses for those most responsible for that success.

People like the 500 mechanics and others who were laid off.

Still, maybe the layoff really is an economic decision. Maybe it’s not a clumsy attempt at union busting.

Maybe it’s a coincidence that the Teamsters Union had plans for a certification election early next year, which most mechanics backed.

Maybe it’s a coincidence that at least 35 members of the mechanics’ organizing committee lost their jobs in the layoff, as the union says.

Maybe it’s also true, as an America West spokesman said, that the timing and makeup of the layoff simply “fits best with the maintenance program we have.” A program that calls for shifting the majority of its heavy maintenance to a company in Everett, Wash.

All of the men and women losing their jobs will receive “generous transition pay and benefits as well as extensive outplacement assistance,” according to America West’s chairman, Bill Franke.

“I heard about that,” one of the laid-off mechanics told me Monday. Like several others who called, he didn’t want me to use his name. He’s afraid of being blackballed.

“I heard I’m going to get this lump sum, and they’re going to bring in people to help us find new jobs. I’m sorry, but am I supposed to be grateful for that? I know a lot of guys who worked their tails off for this company and who put down roots in the community and have house payments and kids in school and all the rest. We’re the hometown airline, remember? That’s us. I don’t want to seem like some whiner, but I feel like we deserved better than this. I don’t want ‘transition pay.’ I want a job. I earned it.”

I’m sure he has.

But he won’t get it. That’s not how business works. Not anymore.

The world and its money are divided these days between those who earn more than they deserve and those who deserve more than they earn.

They understand that in the boardroom of America West. They’ve earned the title of “hometown airline.” They deserve it. Provided, of course, your hometown is Everett, Wash.

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