[Source: Reuters]
In April, Travis Arcamone was named flight attendant of the year at Spirit Airlines’ Orlando, Florida, base.
A month later, he was out of a job, after the company failed to find a way out of a second bankruptcy and collapsed in early May.
Spirit’s demise has left thousands of employees scrambling for work in an industry where getting rehired can take months.
Many airlines have a set number of pilots and flight attendants they intend to hire each year and have already recruited for the peak summer travel season.
More broadly, the industry is navigating short-term capacity cuts to mitigate rising jet fuel costs, while also planning for long-term growth.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, estimated it could take four to five months for several hundred of Spirit’s 3,500 flight attendants to start working at a new airline, and that would be a best-case scenario.
Arcamone, who was one month shy of his ninth anniversary at Spirit when he was laid off, is settling into a new job as a car salesman, while still looking to return to the skies.
But unlike many other industries, rehired pilots and flight attendants must contend with losing seniority and starting at the bottom of their new company’s pay scale, while forfeiting flexibility over schedules and base locations.
“My nearly decade of experience at Spirit might help me get a job somewhere else, but it means absolutely nothing when it comes to how good that job will be when I walk in the door,” a laid-off Spirit pilot told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing job prospects.
“I’ll be a peer to someone who has never flown a jet before,” said the pilot, one of about 1,800 employed by Spirit at the time of its closure.
Former Spirit workers filed a class-action lawsuit last month alleging the carrier failed to provide a proper layoff notice, seeking 60 days of pay and benefits for about 17,000 employees, an attorney representing the group said.
Spirit has until mid-July to respond. A company lawyer said at a court hearing that the airline gave notice as soon as it could.
