Delta recently reached out to Atlanta employees, including pilots and flight attendants, asking them to come into the airport on their own time to help clean up Delta’s Sky Club lounges.
Pathetic Or Reasonable? Delta Asks Employees To “Volunteer” To Clean Lounges In Atlanta
Here’s what Delta wrote to employees:
We Need Volunteers for our ATL Sky Club Experience!!!
We are severely understaffed in the ATL Sky Club due to lack of contractor support (i.e. we are currently short 115 people) which puts our Sky Clubs at risk from a customer satisfaction standpoint.
We are asking for any Delta employee in the ATL area who can help support. Just come to the ATL airport for a few hours to help with cleaning, wiping tables, running food, restocking food buffets, etc. You can wear business casual wear (black slacks and a white shirt) and we will provide aprons. You will be able to pick up gate passes to get past the airport security to get to the ATL Sky Lounge.
There are needs at all times; however there is a limit to three days per person each month. Ideally, we’d be working each week to fill volunteer slots for the following week.
I love how Delta says you “can” wear “business casual” (specifically defined as black slacks and a white shirt, just like all the other SkyClub workers) and it will provide aprons.
People are of different minds as to the root of the problem. Some blame unemployment benefits. Lounge contractors are not paid very much. During the early stages pandemic, with the current raft of generous federal + state benefits, it did not make financial sense to work when you could stay home and chill due to “concern” over the virus. Even with a pay cut, that means no child care, no transportation costs, lower laundry bills, etc.
Per Glassdoor, the average wage for a SkyClub “Ambassador” employed by SodexoMAGIC is $33,905, which works out to about $16.30/hour. That’s still more than what most low-wage workers make from unemployment, but unemployment also leads to support in other areas like healthcare, groceries, and potentially even housing.
Others insist unemployment does not explain the issue. Delta (via its contractors) did lay off a huge number of airport support staff at the start of the pandemic. In many cases, those workers have found better work elsewhere and have no desire to come back. While Amazon, for example, is hiring with decent wage and benefits, Delta is simply not paying enough.
Whatever the root cause, it appears Delta can continue to recruit employee volunteers or simply pay more to find full-time staff. I realize the economics of offering generous wages to low-skill workers does not always work. But unless this is purely people milking the system and their benefits are shortly reduced (and I’ve seen no evidence to back this up, just theories), Delta is going to have to pay its workers a bit more.
And of course it can afford it…never forget how much Delta picked the pockets of U.S. taxpayers during the pandemic. Remember that Delta just bought iPhone 12s for every flight attendant. I mention that not to heap scorn on Delta but to question its inability to find staff.
In the meantime, however, asking employees to pitch in is hardly unique. Think about how Delta provided extremely generous profit-sharing plans to employees and how it avoided involuntary furloughs during the pandemic (prior to payroll support kicking in).
Asking employees to step in and help may smack of desperation, but I don’t think it is anything to be ashamed of. Desperate times calls for desperate measures…
CONCLUSION
Delta has asked employees to step up and volunteer cleaning up SkyClubs in Atlanta. It’s a desperate gesture, but also a reasonable one under the circumstances (Delta truly is short-staffed right now). Long-term, however, relying on unpaid volunteers is dangerous and Delta is probably going to have pay a bit more to hire and retain quality staff.
Concourse F skyclub is a f’ing mess at 430pm ET and they have the upstairs closed. It feels like May 2019 in here.
so matthew, you are a lawyer.
A pilot, volunteering (unpaid—if that’s even legally possible), throws out his back or cuts his hand on a piece of glass, putting him out of work for a while. What rate of workers’ compensation does he receive for lost wages? The rate of a pilot or of a lounge server? He was never hired, classified, or paid as a server and Delta told their workers’ comp insurer that he was a pilot. Just an example.
also seems sketchy, at best. Do I get dinged if I don’t volunteer? This reeks of desparation. Is Ed Bastian gonna be there cleaning tables? Why not?
Delta needs to wake up and start paying people reasonable wages because they have a number of issues. The telephone support is almost non-existent due to extreme hold times (9+ hours).
If I was a pilot or any employee and they wanted me to volunteer, I should wouldn’t do it. Companies don’t go out of their way to help employees so why should any employee help out w/o getting $$$ ?
Are Bastian, the Officers and Directors volunteering or is it below their dignity?
I was thinking that Delta could offer lounge workers and even volunteers “funny money”: Namely, vouchers to be used on standby travel. There’s still a lot of planes flying half full so it’s not a loss of revenue for them.
There’s a unique challenge to staffing airport facilities, of course, in that they can’t just bring in anyone from a temp agency. They need to have clearance to work there.
GD pathetic. Fire the exec who floated this.
You ignore two things in this post. The strong culture and historical support that Delta employees have given their company over time, which explains why the are mostly non-union except for the pilots. They even bought the company a 767-200, the Spirit of Delta. Having worked for one of their main competitors, I appreciate how much better Delta has treated their employees over time than my former company. Also, based on how bad bookings were from March of 2020 through March of 2021, costs had to be cut to reduce cash burn due to low demand. Vaccinations and declines in Covid-19 cases of late in the US have led to a boom in leisure travel which mainly began around Spring Break, which to led to a surge in travel and the overall number of passengers during the six or seven weeks. It takes time to hire back people to work in secured areas, background checks, SITA badging, etc, Hiring back large numbers of people is also dependent on whether the airline thinks the return of passengers will be sustained or maybe just a blip. I would give them the benefit of doubt that they are trying to react to a sudden surge in passenger traffic as best they can until they can hire back people to tend to the clubs.
It’s also very hard for people to just start back on the drop of a hat for a job at the airport. Atlanta has cut back severely on public transport to the airport, and what was already a barely viable job is even tougher now that people have to factor in travel expenses.
I think a key differentiator is “service” culture and those who are employed in the industry; to be honest, I don’t think it’s that uncommon for a hotel to ask people outside a department to take on tasks outside of the role, particularly around the areas of maintenance. This is an ask, and time permitting, I think a lot of service workers, would step-up to help out. As someone who’s worked on-site/”on-property”, and at the corporate levels of travel companies, there’s a definite difference in “ownership” of tasks. Corporate professionals often are territorial of their “sandbox”, but also, especially with more execs coming in with MBAs and having never worked in a customer-facing role on going above and beyond. Executive teams know their teams and know the culture they propagate, so yea, in a sense, they are taking advantage of that culture and those people, but still feel many will be happy to oblige. As for execs, we’ll they took salary “cuts”…so they’ve made their sacrifice (lol) – even if their compensation relies heavily on performance and stock awards.
Whoops (still having morning coffee)…mid paragraph in previous statement, meant that corp staffers are good at being territorial in sandboxes, but also first to reject tasks not in their remit (and sometimes valid reasons for such), but in those that built careers from modest beginnings, you still often encounter this sense of “duty” to the customer. Blah blah blah. It’s disheartening, but alas, it’s corporate America.
$16+ ++++ tips with ++benefits is reasonable for someone to pick-up and clean the clubs….I have always thought there were too many people standing around in the clubs so might be more efficient to have less workers who really work!! then they could pay them more,,.
One of the SC bar staff said she put her kids thru college on her tips alone…
You have to realize that the culture at. Delta is striving to preserved that culture. I retired from the company shortly after 911 with a package that was second to none. The company really took care of everyone.
To give you a few examples: my career started on the ramp in Hartford with a degree in business. One of the first mistakes I made working on the ramp was to help a colleague from a competing airline offload his bags so I could get to my own. This mistake resulted in a union official stopping my friends baggage off loading and calling a wildcat strike. That carrier is now history.
When I worked the ticket counter Union officials would travel on Delta (F) and advise their members to boycott a nonunion airline.
During the fuel crisis of the mid-1970s I worked hand-in-hand with pilots to retain their jobs as ramp agents. On delayed or turnaround flights flight attendants and pilots would help straighten up Aircrafts to keep delays to a minimum.
I was proudly a part of project 767. Our CEO at the time always traveled the same priority for personal travel as the newly hired agent. Our founder invited delayed travelers to his house when hotels were in short supply in Atlanta.
A few years ago I was invited to hear the Delta CEO speak at my college’s business club luncheon. One of the questions a current student asked was “how can you afford to pay such generous profit sharing to your employees?” His response was; how could we not pay generous profit sharing?
I am proud to say that the spirit of Delta is alive and well. There may be times when some people have a bad day. My faith is with that spirit that is instilled in just about every Delta employee and retiree.
Asking for free labor is just wrong period!! Delta Airlines person in charge of asking this is not in their right mind as far as i am concerned. Why should an employee work for free? At least offer compensation for an employee to help out in their spare time. Especially if they are already working a full schedule. Would be best to know who was in charge of this ridiculous request. I am sorry. Just WRONG to even ask such a thing. I have been a flight attendant for 39 years with Continental/United Airlines and I know they would NEVER ask for free help. Appalling and disgraceful