This month I had the privilege of presenting Dick Cloud, United Airlines’ engineering and safety manager facilities and GSE. Dick’s been with United for more than 50 years (!), nearly twice as long as I’ve been alive. There are plenty of remarkable things about Dick’s run with United: he’s been with the same company for his entire career, that career has spanned 50 years, not to mention the litany of accomplishments and ideas.
Dick Cloud has been through the biggest booms in the aviation industry as well as the biggest busts, but one thing has remained the same: United invested in Dick Cloud.
When things aren’t so good, Cloud says, he’s seen 10 percent staffing cuts across-the-board. And when those cuts come, companies go out of business and product lines are picked up – but not normally the people. It can create a cycle of hiring, laying-off and re-hiring, but without the cushion of the seniority from their previous tenure.
“But that’s not only us,” Cloud says. “That’s everybody. I don’t care whether it’s the medical industry. I don’t care if it’s the airline industry. I don’t care if it’s the ground equipment industry.”
So you do what you have to do to get through the lean times, but “when you start going back into the feast,” as Cloud says, is that guy you laid off going to still be around or has he now got another job someplace else with better benefits or higher pay, and now you need to start all over again by training someone brand new and restarting that cycle?
“I have one guy in my tech support group who has been laid off and re-hired 5 times,” Cloud says. “Right now, he’s only got about 4 months’ seniority with the company.”
That guy has to start over pretty much every time. What is he supposed to think of his employer? Is there any loyalty there? Can any be expected of him?
Cloud said it as well as anyone I’ve heard when we met to present the Lifetime Achievement Award in April:
“We fail to tell people thank you for coming to work today. Thank you for doing your job, and we fail to understand a lot of times why we always dwell on the negative rather than on the positive. There’s too much of that in this entire industry and in this entire world right now.”
