Travel Rogue

May 20, 2005

Seniority in Airlines?

Had lunch today with a guy in the airline industry. He had some interesting insights into its workings...let's see if I can relate.

In order to get ahead in an airline, you have to build up seniority, i.e., the longer you work for the airline, the more brownie points you build up. Also, the seniority system isn't restricted to a single level of employment, it's company-wide. This means, so I'm told, that a janitor with 10 years of service has more seniority than a pilot with 3 years of service. So if both the janitor and the pilot are flying standby and there's only one seat, the janitor gets it.

Apparently all the majors have this system in place, but seniority does not transfer from airline to airline. A pilot that has five years under his belt at one airline gets no seniority perks if he joins another airline.

Which makes this next bit interesting. What impact does this seniority system have on wages? Airline employees are dis-incentivized to quit their jobs. So they keep getting raises and no one really gets fired because of the unions. What's this mean? It means the airline ends up with an older, more expensive workforce. Doesn't seem like such a good system for an industry that can't even live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Posted by carolyn at May 20, 2005 02:58 PM

Comments

Post a comment