A Recommendation Letter for Airline Employees

In early March of this year, as the threat from Covid-19 began to gather with frightening speed, our team at United Airlines acted quickly to protect our customers and employees and sent a clear message about what this would mean for our industry as well as our society.

I personally conducted intensive shuttle diplomacy back and forth between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, in unison with my fellow airline industry leaders, to help bring about a political consensus between the Administration and Congress and secure CARES ACT support of our industry to protect airline jobs through October 1.

I know I speak for our entire industry when I express my appreciation to our elected leaders and the American people for protecting the paychecks of hundreds of thousands of airline workers and their families during that critical period.

We pledged to honor their good faith, working with our union partners to ensure involuntary furloughs are a last resort. Thankfully, we were able to reach an agreement with our pilots to avoid furloughs. However, we also felt obligated to say forthrightly at the time that without extending the vital lifeline provided by a second round of CARES funding, the industry would soon run out of options to cope with persistently anemic demand.

Tragically, United reached that point and in October we were forced to make the dreaded decision to furlough many frontline and management workers.

The reason is the simple reality facing us. With the exception of a few small glimmers, demand continues to hover at record lows. And now, given the worries of resurgence of Covid-19 cases across the country and fears of what the winter may bring, it’s increasingly likely travel demand will not return to normal until there is a widely available treatment or vaccine.

This is heartbreaking, and there are no other words for it. Over the past five years as CEO of United, now as its Chairman, I take pride in having served the greatest team of professionals at every level of our company. It stirs the deepest pangs of regret in me to see so many outstanding, talented professionals—through no fault of their own—depart our company. 

Still, we never give up hope, and we are doing everything possible to keep alive the prospect of additional payroll support that would make it possible to bring our employees back; I want our employees and their families to know that. We will continue to manage through this crisis with the goal of welcoming back as many employees as possible.

In the meanwhile, I have a very specific and urgent message for business leaders across the globe: Hire airline professionals.

If you are a corporate executive or entrepreneur, a hiring manager or sole proprietor, hiring the talent currently being lost across United and the airline industry could be your greatest gain.

As you can imagine, at the moment I am writing many reference letters for my colleagues. I would like to write the most impassioned letter of all time on behalf of all of furloughed U.S. airline professionals, especially those in my United family, as they seek to apply their tremendous and, I believe, unequalled talents to new ventures elsewhere. 

I believe any HR recruiter would be hard-pressed to find a comparable group of candidates offering so broad a range of skills and depth of training than modern U.S. airline professionals.

Lest you’re tempted to consider my advocacy for my employees as based merely on my personal respect and care for them, we also have hard data and research available to us. 

For example, the Federal Reserve System conducted an analysis of almost 60 million recent online job ads across key markets. The result is a kind of ‘skills similarity index’ that identifies the most transferrable skills across occupations, which can help job seekers connect with employers who, despite Covid-19’s impact on the economy, remain in need of their skills.

Airline workers, across the various work groups we employ, hold precisely these skills that easily transfer to roles within different companies and industries.

So, if you are an employer looking for a population of job candidates who often speak multiple languages, are trained in the very best of customer service and experience, and who are also trained for crisis management in high-pressure situations: then hire a United Airlines flight attendant.

If you are looking for a group of job candidates who have skills in advanced industry and high-tech, who have experience with operations and logistics, who operate with iron-clad consistency of reliability in safety: hire a United Airlines tech ops/ aircraft maintenance professional.

If you are looking for someone who is trained to deliver the best customer service, who is trained to use the latest technology and database systems to problem-solve in the moment, look no further than a United Airlines gate agent or customer service representative.

I could touch directly on every employee group across our airline – catering, call centers, ramp, safety, cargo… every group within our airline has lost highly-skilled, outstanding individuals.

For at least two decades we’ve read one report and article after another addressing the so-called ‘skills-gap’ and calling for a national program of retraining and continuous skills upgrading for American workers.

Well, U.S. airlines have been investing tens of millions of dollars to train our employees at every level, including workers who occupy high-skill jobs but lack a bachelor’s or associates degree.

If America’s employers hire furloughed airline professionals, they will have solved their skills-gap problem without spending an extra dime. I ask that you realize and take advantage of that opportunity.

If you do, it will be the best business decision you’ve ever made.

As with all the best recommendation letters, I write this not as a favor to my employees or to the aviation industry but as a favor to companies in America – as well as abroad – who will have the benefit of their hard-earned talent, skills and character.