Alaska Airlines on Monday filed notice with Washington state of almost 1,600 permanent layoffs starting from Oct. 1, the day after the government’s Payroll Support Program (PSP) ends.
The local layoffs represent about 20% of the airline’s employees in Washington state, and includes customer service agents, flight attendants and maintenance technicians, Alaska said. Most of those affected are from the airline’s 6,000 flight attendants.
The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) union told its members in an online post that it has received 60-day layoff notices for approximately 2,089 of the most junior flight attendants company-wide, affecting all the airline’s bases in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Anchorage, Los Angeles and San Diego.
However, the union said the actual number of layoffs come October may be lower. The total of more than 2,000 is “inclusive of a significant buffer” above the expected number of actual layoffs in order to make sure the company complies with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
Alaska management in a statement said it “will continue to refine our staffing modeling over the next several weeks and expect figures to be final closer to October 1.”
Source: seattletimes.com