It is a shame to see that the Shuttle America employees have agreed to further wage concessions in order to keep the company flying and their jobs. While I fully understand that there is a philosophy that any job is better than no job, I really have a hard time believing that putting employees into what are basically poverty level wages is a requirement to successfully operate this or any company. Too often this is a "shove it down their throat" solution playing upon the worst fears of people trying to support their families. In this case, Wexford has grossly mismanaged a company they got for a song and applied their traditional in your face employee relations methods to rectify their inability to place Shuttle in an appropriate environment.
Shuttle's original business plan was very well conceived as a point to point regional operator connecting smaller markets into large metropolitan areas utilizing suburban type airports such as Bedford and Trenton. It did very well at that mission but was undercapitalized rendering it very difficult to gain scale. Wexford got the thing and put it into a loss ridden hub for a dysfunctional carrier. That now appears to be a very strategic misstep by Wexford so now the employees pay for that with their family finances. I'm sure the bozos at Wexford are not sweating day care and college issues for their kids. I will almost guarantee that Shuttle will still fail because history shows pretty clearly that all the employee concessions in the world do not offset poor management and poor market position. The load factors for the original Shuttle averaged about 11 pts. higher than what Wexford is doing with it now. Having food stamp employees will not change that fact.
Shuttle's original business plan was very well conceived as a point to point regional operator connecting smaller markets into large metropolitan areas utilizing suburban type airports such as Bedford and Trenton. It did very well at that mission but was undercapitalized rendering it very difficult to gain scale. Wexford got the thing and put it into a loss ridden hub for a dysfunctional carrier. That now appears to be a very strategic misstep by Wexford so now the employees pay for that with their family finances. I'm sure the bozos at Wexford are not sweating day care and college issues for their kids. I will almost guarantee that Shuttle will still fail because history shows pretty clearly that all the employee concessions in the world do not offset poor management and poor market position. The load factors for the original Shuttle averaged about 11 pts. higher than what Wexford is doing with it now. Having food stamp employees will not change that fact.
