American Airlines May Make Another Massive Layoff

American Airlines is a name that many of you already know, but do you know much about its parent company, which recently filed for bankruptcy. Here is a look at how the company has decided to take its fiscal problems, “AMR Corporation (“the Company”), the parent company of American Airlines, Inc. (“American”) and AMR Eagle Holding Corporation (“American Eagle”), announced that in order to achieve a cost and debt structure that is industry competitive and thereby assure its long-term viability and ability to continue delivering a world-class travel experience for its customers, the Company and certain of its U.S.-based subsidiaries (including American and American Eagle), filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on November 29, 2011.”

After several rounds of layoffs most people though that the company was done with the bulk of its layoffs after cutting several large rounds of workers. Yet the company is getting ready to make another mass layoff action happen. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

The company has sent layoff notices to 11,159 workers, all of whom were members of the Transport Workers Union. For the time being the company is not saying exactly how many jobs will be cut from that, but with this many workers on the line even a loss of 10 percent of the notified jobs will be large.

For those of you who missed out on our earlier cuts made by the company here is an excerpt, “The job cuts will impact all of the positions at nine facilities. Seven on those facilities will be in the U.S. and the remaining two are in Canada. The company expects to outsource its baggage handling and cargo operations.  The airports that are expected to be impacted by the job cuts and outsourcing include the following: Columbus, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; Hartford, Connecticut; Sacramento, California; Portland, Oregon; Reno, Nevada; Calgary and Vancouver.”

Before that American Airlines announced some even broader scale job cuts in order to being the process of complying with their bankruptcy filing.  For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed on the cuts that have already come:” Today, AMR is the parent company of both American Airlines, Inc. and American Eagle Airlines, Inc., and has a number of businesses and key facilities within its corporate structure. The company is also a founding member of the global oneworld Alliance. All aspects of the airline’s worldwide activities are overseen from AMR’s Corporate Headquarters campus in Fort Worth, Texas…How many workers are getting the boot? Well, that is the worst of the news. The layoffs are expected to affect up to 20,000 workers.”