Lakefield thanked those employees who worked extra shifts during the weekend, then berated those who did not come to work. "For those few who did not want to do their job, I am dumbfounded by their motivation and rationale," he said in the memo.
Christopher L. Chiames, a US Airways spokesman, yesterday said "a couple of work groups" -- flight attendants and baggage handlers in Philadelphia -- called in sick at about two to three times the normal rate.
Baggage claim tags pile up on the windowsill near the US Airways customer service office in Philadelphia on Saturday.
(Jacqueline Larma -- AP)
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R. Thomas Buffenbarger, international president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents the baggage handlers, said no sickout was organized by the union. "We would never do anything, especially at this time of the year, that would precipitate this kind of situation," he said.
The problem, he said, was inadequate staffing in Philadelphia, which is a major hub for the airline. He said that 100 to 180 baggage workers had been laid off in recent weeks. Buffenbarger said the union had tried to warn the airline since Thanksgiving, but "nobody wanted to listen," adding, "They just wanted to talk about more wage cuts and give-backs."
Chiames said that the airline had not furloughed any employees in Philadelphia but that many jobs were lost through attrition. He said the carrier is trying to hire new employees as fast as it can.
The weekend disruption comes at a critical time for US Airways, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September, the second time in two years. Just before Christmas, the airline had won a 13 percent pay cut from its reservation and gate agents, but it still needed concessions from its flight attendants and machinists. The company has said that without immediate labor cuts, liquidation could begin by mid-January.
Some believe this weekend's difficulties were a sign that workers had begun translating their grievances into retaliation. Robert Bruno, professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois, said the workers may believe the system is failing them and that all they have left is "some form of resistance that sends a message to the company and maybe to the union that their cutoff point is coming."
Travel experts and some industry analysts said the bad publicity could be the final blow for the airline, with passengers deserting it for other carriers.
"I think this was liquidation weekend for US Airways," said Terry Trippler, president of the travel information company that publishes the Web site TerryTrippler.com. "You can blame anybody you want to blame, but this is when the airline completely collapsed." Trippler said he would consider buying a ticket on the airline for the next couple of months, but beyond that, "I would be worried about my money."
Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant, called the weekend's events the equivalent of a "torpedo fired from within."
Yet the dire predictions were not unanimous. Glenn Engel, an airline analyst at Goldman Sachs, said "everybody knows that airline customers are amazingly disloyal. They go wherever the low fare is." If a flight is canceled or a bag lost, customers will hate the airline for a while, until another one loses the bags or cancels flights, he said. "Then you hate someone else," said Engel whose company's clients includes several airlines, including US Airways.
Engel said liquidation of an airline is very difficult because there are "so many stakeholders with vested interests to keep it alive," including its major creditors and suppliers, labor unions that want to preserve jobs and local governments that want to keep flights into their cities.
"Airlines may not create a lot of value for shareholders, but they do for other constituents who want them to survive. That's why they are so hard to kill," Engel said.
