Word: aires
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...that he needed to convince some of France's most wildly militant workers and their unions that they had everything to gain as partners with management and everything to lose as adversaries. In France? Bonne chance. Yet Air France employees are less grumpy campers (they're still French), and the company is reaping the rewards of labor peace and French élan in the skies. The notoriously dysfunctional bad boy of air transport earned $1.2 billion in the fiscal year that ended in March 2006, on sales of $28.2 billion, and $1.62 billion for the first three-quarters...
With global travel in its best shape in years, Air France is enjoying the fruits of its 2003 merger with Dutch airline KLM, creating a dual-hub network with considerable global reach. Skeptics predicted the marriage would founder on Dutch resentment of notoriously overbearing French handling of past binational mergers. Yet the partnership has not only functioned better than management or labor had hoped, but has also established the sector's standard for future linkups. "Everyone else is now trying to follow. Some airlines are actually seeking to replicate it to the smallest details," says Yan Derocles, an analyst with...
Quite a turnaround for an airline that lost nearly $1 billion in 1993--the same year marauding workers shocked the travel world by occupying runways and halting traffic at both Paris airports to protest proposed cost cutting. Still bleeding cash the following year, Air France needed a $3.9 billion injection from the government to stay afloat. And despite a considerable restructuring and divestment plan put into place as part of that bailout, by 1998 the airline was back to its bad old tricks. A strike on the eve of the 1998 World Cup, to which France played host, cost...
...also regularly consulted Air France employees so that they began to feel involved in the airline's management (staff opinions are sought on cabin uniforms from Christian Lacroix), and he struck labor agreements that would leave American managers gobsmacked. "We found a right balance of effort and reward, of commitment to plan and profit sharing via salaries and benefits," Spinetta explains. "Since then, the success of the company has depended on employees understanding our strategy, getting fully behind it and feeling secure knowing that if it all works out, profits from it will be redistributed to them." It's also...
Spinetta was well positioned to handle the labor battle. A career civil servant as opposed to a market-hardened manager, he joined the transport ministry in 1988. He was picked to head the state-owned domestic airline Air Inter in 1990. It was fully merged into Air France in 1997, when Spinetta was tapped to run the whole airline. He immediately appealed to employees to become partners in the company. "If we're all still here today, it's because Spinetta convinced workers that he was serious about negotiating and that the sacrifices we had to make were just," says...