Delta Air Lines, the world’s largest airline, announced that they have successfully reached two merger milestones. Mike Campbell, executive vice president of Human Resources and Labor Relations, sent out a memo to Delta employees saying, “First, the remaining seniority integration committees representing pre-merger Delta employees in the larger workgroups presented their recommendations for fair and equitable seniority integration methods for the combined workgroups. Second, we resolved representation issues for our planners, trainers, and reliability and technical analysts in our Technical Operations group.” Impressive, yes?
Let’s review a few of the major merger issues that have already been resolved. Delta has successfully integrated pilots, dispatchers, AMTs, and meteorologists. A major step pending is the flight attendant integration, however not too long ago the Delta flight attendant seniority committee presented their stance on “fair and equitable integration for flight attendants.” The Northwest flight attendants still have yet to accept; once accepted, flight attendants can be checked off the list.
Another checkpoint, as outlined in the memorandum, is to combine ACS/Cargo, Reservation sales and TechOps Stores employees of both airlines. “And if these recommendations were to be agreed to by representatives of pre-merger Northwest employees and accepted by the company, we would have seniority integration issues resolved for the vast majority of our combined employee groups.”
That’s pretty much it for Delta. This merger has gone much smoother than I ever thought – however being a Philadelphian who witnessed the US Airways / America West merger, I guess that’s not too hard to do better than. A better comparison for seniority integration: the American & TWA combination – American Airlines wiped TWA pilots’ seniority right off their resume. There are plenty of examples where mergers have “gone wrong” or haven’t been fair to both sides. This is not true in Delta’s case. It seems as though Northwest is seamlessly merging into Delta – Great work!
Don’t forget, Delta has a blog!
Quotations / news attained here.
