The Wall Street Journal
By Scott McCartney
Dec. 3, 2014 5:43 p.m. ET
Abu Dhabi
To
drill the importance of innovation into its class of 30 flight
attendants from five continents, an Etihad Airways employee flashed a
picture of Steve Jobs on the screen in a conference room at the
company’s training academy here.
The message was that the iPhone
“won its market” and Etihad can do the same with innovation and service,
the instructor said. “Yes, you are cabin crew. But at the end of the
day, you are our sales executives onboard.”
But the method was
just as important. “English is not their first language, but iPhone is.
It’s common to everybody,” said Aubrey Tiedt, Etihad’s Irish-born vce
president of guest services, who oversees training.
Persian Gulf
airlines are shaking up the airline industry and its customers by
offering high-quality service, often at lower prices than competitors.
They are doing it in part by attracting employees from all corners of
the globe, many of them from impoverished, low-wage areas. The workers
live under close supervision in company housing in the United Arab
Emirates or Qatar, work long hours and abide by contract terms that
other parts of the world find objectionable. All three Gulf
airlines—Etihad, Qatar and Emirates—may fire women if they become
pregnant.
“We offer a tremendous opportunity, and if people don’t
like it, they don’t have to give notice if they want to leave us,” Ms.
Tiedt says.
Training employees to react as a team in an emergency
is one of the great challenges of the globalized airline industry. The
Persian Gulf airlines operate in English, but it’s the second language
for almost all their workers. New hires typically must live with someone
from another country to avoid segregating into cliques or lapsing into
native language instead of honing English skills.
Eleven-year-old
Etihad revamped its training program two years ago to include far more
visual learning for employees from 113 different countries. Interactive
computer programs force students to set a business-class dinner table
the way the airline prescribes, for example, by clicking and dragging
pictures instead of reading instructions.
And to make sure
workers are learning, Etihad and its larger rivals have invested
hundreds of millions of dollars in full-motion simulators for flight
attendants, not just cockpit simulators for pilots. All airlines train
in cabin mock-ups. Most don’t spend the way these three carriers have on
full-motion modules that can simulate airplane movements and create
turbulence, pour smoke into a cabin and light fires in overhead storage
bins or other airplane areas. The sensation of a bad landing with the
collapse of a nose wheel or even a landing where the plane rolls onto
its side can be created, and trainees have to open aircraft emergency
doors from awkward positions.
“If there’s a fire, I need you to act.…On board, you might panic or freeze. But not if you’ve done it before,” says Ms. Tiedt.
Emirates,
the largest of the Gulf carriers and now the fourth-largest airline in
the world by passenger traffic, says it receives about 400,000
applications a year for jobs across the company. The airline’s employees
span 143 nationalities. Most new hires are in their mid-20s. Many have
had a prior job in hotels, restaurants or even other airlines and
understand basic principles of customer service.
But just like
any workplace, crew members can disagree and bicker among themselves. On
a recent Emirates flight to the U.S., the crew came from 20 different
countries and spoke 22 languages. Asked if they all got along, a flight
attendant smiled. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Today it’s OK. There was
no trouble,” he says.
Gulf airlines say they offer a rare chance
for workers around the globe: pay that’s competitive with other
airlines, enticing benefits and travel. Salaries are tax-free in the
United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and housing, utilities, transportation
to work, health care and uniforms are free or heavily subsidized. The
housing is typically a two-bedroom apartment shared by two new hires in a
secure compound—better than camps where construction workers typically
live in Qatar and the U.A.E., but still criticized by U.S. and European
airline labor unions as confinement. (The airlines say it isn’t
confinement, but simply a way to keep employees safe.)
In
general, workers are expected to put in longer hours than is typical of
established rivals in Europe and North America. “We don’t have
restrictive work limits,” says Terry Daly, Emirates’ senior vice
president for service delivery.
All airlines have to follow
minimum rules set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, but
regulators in the U.S. and Europe impose greater limits on crews,
especially pilots, and many airlines have union contracts with even
stricter rules to combat fatigue. Airlines follow the rules of their
home country, regardless of where they fly.
The differences often
are small on paper, and the Gulf airlines have the advantage of long
flights where employees are more likely to put in a full day in the air.
Other airlines have employees waiting between shorter flights more
often. Qatar says its flight attendants work 90 to 100 hours of flying
time a month, with eight days off. United Airlines’ contract with its
flight attendants allows for a maximum of 95 hours flying a month with
10 days off. But other contract terms on vacation, rest and rescheduling
can give United flight attendants more time off.
Gulf airlines
say they study fatigue closely, schedule crews carefully and operate
within accepted safety limits. On a recent 16-hour flight from Dubai to
Dallas-Fort Worth, pilots and flight attendants got about the same
amount of rest U.S. crews would get. The Emirates A380 carried two
captains (one Australian, the other Indian) and two co-pilots (one from
Malta and the other Ireland), each flying for eight hours. Flight
attendants, from Asia, Europe, Africa and other regions, changed into
their own Emirates-issued pajamas for rest periods.
Unions in
Europe and the U.S., fearing job losses to the fast-growing airline
rivals, have criticized the rivals’ work rules and government support.
The International Transport Federation, a major union, filed a complaint
earlier this year over Qatar Airways with a United Nations group called
the International Labour Organization, which has been pressuring the
government in Qatar.
“These are discriminatory battles we fought
and won decades ago, and it’s a concern they are still in place today,”
says Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, the
largest U.S. flight attendants union.
At Emirates, an employee
who becomes pregnant in her first three-year contract must resign and
can return later to the company, Mr. Daly says. Etihad will let pregnant
crew members fly for the first three months, but then they have to
leave or move into a ground job, if available, Ms. Tiedt says. Qatar
says a pregnant crew member must immediately notify the company of the
pregnancy and resign because the company doesn’t consider working in the
air while pregnant safe. The employee can move to a ground job if one
is available.
All three Gulf airlines say women sign contracts to
work for them knowing the pregnancy policy, and the companies expect
them to work once the airline has invested in their training. Qatar’s
chief executive, Akbar Al Baker, dismissed criticism of working
conditions as gripes from disgruntled former employees and unions. “We
give people very good work conditions,” he says.
Employees do
need company permission to marry during their first five years on the
job, though he says that’s a formality. The company does monitor
entrances at housing with cameras and visitors are recorded. “Records
are for the safety of my girls,” Mr. Al Baker says. He also notes he was
the first in the region to hire female pilots and now has more than 100
female pilots at his airline.
In the U.S., the Federal Aviation
Administration says it has no restrictions on pregnant flight attendants
as long as they can physically perform their duties. AFA’s Ms. Nelson
notes U.S. employers can’t legally discriminate against someone for
being pregnant, and the union fought for accommodations such as
maternity uniforms and pregnancy leave.
Qatar’s salaries for
cabin crew start at $24,000 a year tax-free, fairly close to the norm in
the U.S. and Europe. Captains start at a very competitive $200,000 a
year and first officers at $130,000 a year.
Emirates defends its
work rules by noting that 11,000 of its 53,000 employees have been with
the company for 10 years or more. Even though many pilots laid off at
U.S. and European airlines in the last recession found work with the
fast-growing Gulf carriers, there hasn’t been a mass exodus of pilots
when hiring resumed in the U.S. and Europe, Mr. Daly says.
Etihad
tries to bridge the cultural divides by uniting workers around the
airline itself as an identity. The seven weeks of new-hire training and
recurrent training includes education about the airline industry,
Etihad’s history and how the airline can capitalize on malaise at
competitors with enthusiastic service. “If they don’t understand the
business, it just becomes robotic,” Ms. Tiedt says.
- Source: http://online.wsj.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment