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Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ Coffee, Tea and Fatigue: Airline Job Loses Its Allure April 20, 2004 By JOE SHARKEY Long, long gone are the good old days, when flight attendants with indelible smiles donned white gloves to serve dinner on fine china. Today, as airlines battle furiously over fares while desperately cutting costs, the flight attendant's job on major airlines has gone from glamour to grind. "We're tired," said George Price, a flight attendant for 20 years. "We're worn out. Every day we get reports of flight attendants working completely fatigued. First and foremost, that contributes to a safety issue. And yes, it does also diminish the level of customer service that we provide." Mr. Price is the spokesman for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, the union that represents 19,500 working flight attendants and an additional 5,760 furloughed ones at American Airlines. American's flight attendants have one more reason to be unhappy these days, and it has to do with a memorandum from an American regional executive who basically told them they were doing a crummy job. The internal memo - which was first reported by The Dallas Morning News last week - was written by John M. Tiliacos, American's Northeast regional managing director. It was addressed to all American flight attendants in the Northeast. Noting that fierce competition from low-fare carriers "threatens our survival," Mr. Tiliacos wrote: "I thought I would share with you some 'eye-opening' feedback we've received from some of our corporate accounts." Basically, he wrote, corporate travel managers whose decisions are "worth millions of dollars in revenue to American" have been telling American executives that "you are making it very difficult for us to make our people fly A.A. because of your poor service." Travel managers say they "are being pressured by their employees to seek an alternate carrier to do business with, instead of American," Mr. Tiliacos wrote, adding: "Customers have told us repeatedly that were it not for our extensive global network, our schedule frequency and our AAdvantage program, they would likely choose another airline to serve their needs, because they are dissatisfied with our overall service and lack of consistency." Mr. Tiliacos's memo enumerated a long list of complaints he said business travelers have been making about American flight attendants. Among them, according to the memo: "Flight attendants are not enthusiastic, friendly or helpful." They gripe in front of passengers about "internal issues" like "minimum rest, crew meals and salary reductions." They make poor first impressions and do not greet passengers by name. Passengers "are afraid to ask for anything" because flight attendants "seem annoyed" at requests. "Flight attendants should consider each flight as a client meeting," the memo quoted one corporate client as suggesting. Near the end of his memo, Mr. Tiliacos said, "My purpose in sharing this feedback with you is to solicit your help" in changing such perceptions. A company memo that infuriates its recipients is bound to get wider distribution than the intended receiver list. The memo was quickly posted on a deliciously subversive Web site, InternalMemos.com, that publishes texts of many company memos that the boss would probably just as soon remain internal. "When you distribute an insulting memo like that to 5,000 flight attendants, there's going to be somebody angry enough to get it to the press," Mr. Price, the union spokesman, pointed out. American Airlines, interestingly enough, hasn't gone into hiding to avoid the furor created by the memo. An American spokeswoman, Jacquie Young, said: "It was an internal letter to provide feedback on what some of our customers are saying. We try to be direct and honest with our employees. I would add that the majority of our flight attendants do a superb job on every flight every day." At the flight attendants' union, angry phone calls and e-mail messages "reflect an overall level of disgust that I have never seen before," Mr. Price said. Considering what flight attendants have gone through in recent years, that's quite a statement. Let me interject here that dissatisfaction about inattentive and sometimes unfriendly flight attendants has grown in recent years, especially on major airlines. At the same time, low-fare airlines (many of which are hiring flight attendants, incidentally) have become well known among business travelers for friendly in-flight service, even if they don't bring you dinner. I'll follow up with reader reaction to this in a future column. (Let me start by saying that I fly Continental Airlines out of Newark for most domestic trips, and in my opinion Continental's flight attendants fully live up to their reputation for providing good, friendly service). In the meantime, though, I think Mr. Price's views deserve careful consideration in any discussion about in-flight service on the major airlines. "Our flight attendants stepped up to the plate" almost exactly a year ago, when American was granted $340 million in concessions by the attendants, he said. "The feelings about having to do that are still very raw, but over that same period of time we have seen innumerous awards for exemplary customer service." American's flight attendants, he argued, do the best they can under deteriorating work conditions. "One of the concessions we made was to allow them to reduce our layovers, if needed, to as little as eight hours" between flights, he said. The eight-hour layover, which he said is now standard on some routes, begins 15 minutes after arrival at the gate and ends an hour before departure the next day. Given travel time from airport to hotel and back, that can effectively be a five- or six-hour layover, he said. Another concession: Flight attendants don't get meals any more. "You can literally go 12 to 15 hours with no food. You can fly from Dallas to Tokyo and not get a meal unless you brought something yourself." Pay cuts, lousy hours, bad sleep patterns, hunger, unappreciative bosses, grouchy customers - all in an industry that's losing billions. Right now, "there's no way you can work to 100 percent capacity," Mr. Price said. On the Road appears each Tuesday. 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