A boomerang from employees prompted United Airlines to shelve a quarterly remuneration lottery plan that made it more difficult for staff to net rewards.
“Our intention was to introduce a better, more exciting program, but we misjudged how these interchanges would be received by many of you,” United’s president, Scott Kirby, stipulate in a note to employees.
United had been giving employees bonuses each lodge when they met certain company performance metrics. But they changed it for a new pool program in which qualifying employees could enter to win prizes. For admonition, a single employee could win $100,000, while other prizes allow for vacations and cash rewards, according to the Chicago Business Journal, citing a company memo.
The interchange to the bonus program comes as United and other airlines are facing higher nutriment and other costs but are also adding service.
Now United is “pressing the lapse button” on the program as it reviews employee feedback, Kirby said.
Some hands were not on board with the program.
Pilots complained to their compatibility that the change would make it harder to earn bonuses. The chairman of the cartel’s United council met with senior executives of the airline before the aim was scrapped, said a union spokesman, Roger Phillips.
Laurie Vesalo, whose LinkedIn chapter says she is a United Airlines flight attendant, wrote a letter that was posted on Transmute.org titled “Make United Airlines Great Again.” It outlined grouse about United’s flight attendants’ compensation and working conditions.
“They ran away our quarterly incentive bonuses, and changed it to a deplorable new system that only comeuppances an elite few,” it said. “No surprise, since they are good at only assigning an ‘elite few’ — aka the upper management, and not the entire population of frontline blue-collar workers.”
The post also complained that employees did not receive a $1,000 remuneration after the new tax law passed. Other airlines, including competitors American Airlines and JetBlue, doled out such honoraria.
“Why did they get the bonus? Because they care about their wage-earners? That’s why. Novel idea,” said the petition, which received 1,000 promoters.
United had about 89,800 employees, about 80 percent of them unionized, as of the end of 2017, concording to a recent company filing.