Delta Air Lines (DL, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson) will have 3,000 more flight attendants than it needs until beyond summer 2021 and has asked cabin crew to take up to a year off without pay to avoid involuntary furloughs.
It will need at least 3,000 of its approximately 20,000 cabin crew to take unpaid leave of between four and 12 months, or to consider other options, if they and the company are to avoid involuntary furloughs, sources told CNBC and Reuters on August 7.
As previously reported, last month Delta posted a USD7.1 billion pre-tax loss for the second quarter of 2020, including USD3.2 billion in items directly related to the pandemic, such as fleet restructuring costs and other write-downs. Revenues suffered a 91% drop.
Also last month, the airline told pilots that furloughs would be avoided if they agreed to a cut in guaranteed minimum pay.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian confirmed during the company’s latest earnings call that almost 20% of the company’s workforce - more than 17,000 of its 91,000 employees - had taken voluntary departure packages during the last week of July, including over 1,700 of its 7,900 pilots.
This will “minimise if not eliminate the need for involuntary furloughs,” he said.
In an internal memo, he praised the employees who volunteered to leave, a gesture that will make Delta “a more nimble airline that will be better positioned to endure the crisis and recover quickly,” Reuters reported.
This makes it more likely that the carrier could avoid mass furloughs on the scale recently outlined by American Airlines and United Airlines, which have warned a combined 61,000 workers that they may be let go on October 1. Unions have lobbied to extend the CARES Act Payroll Support Program (PSP) until March 31, 2021, a proposal that appears to have gained bipartisan momentum in Congress.
