Washington Post: A Future That's Up in the Air

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/14/AR2007071400016.html


United flight attendant Dianne Tamuk swinging her feet over a DC 10 engine in the early 1980s when the big airlines ruled the skies, and today, at 52. Tamuk lost thousands of dollars in annual income and 40 percent of her expected pension in United's bankruptcy and restructuring.
Left: Courtesy Dianne Tamuk; Right: Helayne Seidman for The Washington Post

A Future That's Up in the Air

By Dale Russakoff
Sunday, July 15, 2007; Page F01

What does economic change look and feel like when it is coming straight at you? The Washington Post takes a close-up look at working Americans who find themselves caught in the path of global forces transforming the economy.

NEW YORK -- It was a perfect day for flying as United Flight 27 soared out of John F. Kennedy International Airport, and Dianne Tamuk, the lead flight attendant -- still blond and exuberant at 52 -- welcomed everyone to United's skies for perhaps the 5,000th time in her career. Tamuk's smile is as winning as when she started out in 1978, her sure-and-steady voice a balm for the rising anxiety of flying.

It's a good thing she's resilient because Tamuk will be smiling her way through at least another thousand of those announcements. The meltdown in the airline industry since Sept. 11, 2001, has decimated pensions and reduced pay for flight attendants, making planned retirements for many in Tamuk's generation unaffordable. The grim joke at United is that those wheelchairs at the end of the ramp aren't just for elderly passengers; soon enough, they'll be for the crew.

"It is amazing to me any United employee can still smile at customers," said aviation industry consultant Michael Boyd. "But they do, and their in-flight customer service is among the best in the world."

Tamuk says her smile is real because she still loves her job, although this now requires some serious compartmentalizing. "You know your entire financial future has changed, but you don't want to face it because there's not a whole lot you can do about it," she said. "In a way, I compare it to the passengers who went back to flying after 9/11. The vulnerability is there, but you're not going to dwell on it. Otherwise you wouldn't get on the plane."

Flight attendants have plenty of company among workers who have lost pay and retirement security as economic change has engulfed one industry after the next. United Airlines was tallying sky-high profits in the late 1990s when the industry took a precipitous plunge. The dot-com bust, terrorism, the rise of low-cost carriers like JetBlue and the proliferation of Web sites directing customers to rock-bottom fares all combined to drain passengers away from the old, established airlines. United, Delta, US Airways and Northwest all filed for bankruptcy protection and American and Continental endured painful restructurings. United was losing $20 million a day at the time of its December 2002 filing. And that was before the spike in oil prices.

FULL story at link.

[Cha]

1. That's too bad..who knew

United Airlines would go pauper on their employees when they were flying so high in the '90's?