Word: labors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jean-Cyrill Spinetta recalls the dark days of 1997 when he took command of financially strapped Air France, charged with pulling the airline out of a tailspin of labor unrest and a half-decade of losses. A growing number of French customers, long accustomed to work stoppages, viewed the airline with distrust and scorn. "When people start looking at their own flag carrier as unreliable, you've really got a problem," says Spinetta...
...wasn't just labor. Slimmed-down European rivals like British Airways had been aggressively exploiting deregulation to fuel growth, while ferocious American cost cutters like Delta were wooing ever larger numbers of passengers with lower transatlantic fares. "We got to a point where in order to survive, we simply had to assure our clients and own business a degree of stability by breaking the cycle of strikes, disruption and losses," he says...
...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 of the current one, an increase of 31%. Those...
...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 Paris brokerage Oddo Securities. "It's got virtually the entire world covered...
...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...