Dear Numero,
BA. As you see below in the Reuters piece, BA did a very different thing than cathay. They sat down, talked, negotiated with the pilots union before announcing a "temporary" 20% paycut. And the number of jobs cut were 200, not 30-50. Cathay arbitrarily voided the contract and cut everyone's pay and benefits by 50%... PERMANENTLY.
-----(Reuters) - British Airways pilots have accepted a deal that will temporarily cut pay by 20% and eliminate more than 200 jobs, the pilots' union said on Friday.
"The deal means that there will be temporary 20% pay cuts reducing to 8% over two years and towards zero over the longer term", British Airline Pilots Association said in a statement.
"Regrettably, there will still be some compulsory redundancies which are currently estimated to be 270 although that number will fall as mitigations take effect", the statement added.-----
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile..../idUKKCN24W327
Quantas. Qantas has had up to 20,000 people "stood down" for a long time now and they just announced another 2500 to be added to the number they have "stood down" now. Stood down means go home without pay until we need you again. In the US it's called lay off, others call it redundancy. Standdowns are not voluntary. Again, something very different than cathay has done. Pure manpower downsizing in fact. This article mentions it specifically as "thousands of pilots and cabin crew". I couldn't find the actual numbers. But I don't know where you got the information you put on here saying "QF ended up getting enough voluntary redundancies and LWOP takers to not let go of any. Yes they have also massively reduced their wage bill but point is minimal reduction in manpower"
The following article is from Barron's on Qantas. They do a very good job of aviation business coverage.
Exerpt from the article link below:
" In addition to thousands of pilots and cabin crew being stood down or made redundant in 2020, Qantas recently announced 2,500 more would be stood down in response to the latest outbreak."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bar...ar-01629936609
Delta. The US airlines' business situation was a hiccup compared to cathay's, quantas or BA's choking. The flying came back in a much shorter time and for a while now the airports are jammed, flights are full, and they've been hiring pilots at full speed at places that didn't cut much flying or staff (using the massive bailout cash government gave them to cover losses). Yes some US airlines offered generous early retirement packages (that make cathay's offers laughable) and yes a couple of them like American and delta over-did it as a result, are severly undermanned now and in full speed hiring mode. 1200 or more a year. So again, the air travel business in the US was not as badly affected as it has been elsewhere. Even if they had done lay offs, they would have called them all back a long time ago.
Also yes disposing aircraft which aren't able to be utilized same as any other asset not able to be utilized and is costing money in lease payments, upkeep and maintenance etc is a big part of downsizing. BUT, it takes a lot more time to get rid of those assets compared to getting rid of human assets. Unfortunately the law appears to protect the business interests of the lessers of those aircraft more the the livelihoods of the human assets. Not so easy to get out of most of those leases so easily or quickly without bankruptcy intervention. Cathay couldn't just announce "give us a 50% discount on all these aircraft or we fire them in 2 weeks" like they did to their pilot people. That is the difference. Which makes getting rid of aircraft not a quick solution to stopping cash bleed. Thats why it isn't done in appreciable numbers, yet. Ideally of course ALL assets should be cut according to the current and short term need projections. Even moving to a smaller headquarters building IF projections show it will make a big enough impact on long term survival of the business.
Dear all:
It takes much more than numbers to understand and predict ANYTHING, but especially in the airline business. This is why an airline can't be run properly by non-airline managers otherwise known as accountants. Just like how you say something can have a very different impact, how you do something can also have very different impacts. In how the people you're saying it to or doing it to perceive it. Doing so in the manner cathay has done so utterly crudely (and is continuing to make worse every day by coming up with new ways to drain blood out of it's pilots) has taken away any employer credibility they might have had prior to this. They've cut their own throat just because they could. Can an accountant calculate how much money it costs to have employees with such low morale come to work every day? I've seen first hand in 7 different airlines and 30 years how good morale brings millions in money savings and bad morale costs millions. (Nevermind the hull loss or two in cathay's future) It will never be tracable on paper. But each of us who know how the job is done can easily see it in real-time day to day operations. But the board of directors and all their minion accountant managers have no idea, unless they've spent their career in "airline management" AND have proven to be from the small percentage of management experts who can succeed in airline management. Cathay has exactly zero number of this type individual within it.
What works and what fails has already been proven through many downturns and uptands for decades. It's the stupid who insist on learning from their own mistakes and not from other people's mistakes. Thinking you're smarter than others is a good sign you're the stupid one.