ng-term plan to take on Southwestern Airlines was unveiled in August (Zellner, Schine & Chandler). Southwest is the dominant short-haul domestic airline, famous for its productivity, bare-bones operation and high employee morale (Labich, May 2). Key to the head-on competition announced by United is the new-found ability to cut labor costs to 7.4( per passenger mile (compared to Southwest's 7.2() - down from 9.3( just a month earlier - an average 14% cut in labor costs (Labich, August 22, & Castro). Those pay concessions were only made possible by the buyout agreement. The savings were part of the unions' purchase price - in return for a freeze on union employee layoffs. In negotiating idiom, it was a "Win-Win" situation: pay cuts = increased profitability = employment stability.
Those were the immediate positive results of changing the management-employee equation at United Airlines, a strong beginning that translated into obvious benefits for all. Not so obvious, nor so-clearly defined as a "benefit," are the changes incurring internally at United. Those changes involve structural and psychological adaptation by the participants. How that adaptation is effected will determine the long-range forecast of whether the changes implied are both permanent and positive.
Is change desirable? According to Peter Drucker in "The Age of Social Transformation" (1994), though the tempo of the times dictates change as inevitable, for workers and management alike it is more a challenge than an unquestioned opportunity.
Airline employees stand at the forefront of what Drucker describes as "knowledge workers." Drucker's "knowledge workers" utilize specialized applied knowledge and manual skills of more or less equal measure. Neurosurgeons are knowledge workers. So are pilots, airplane mechanics and, even, reservation clerks and flight attendants - at least, for the latter two positions, as successfully employed in the Southwest Airl...