Frontier Airlines CEO says the pandemic made workers 'lazy' and less productive: 'People are still allowing people to work from home, all this silliness, right?'
The pandemic made it clear to us that our literal lives don't matter. Record profits have pretty much never made their way into worker's pockets. Wages have been stagnant against forty years of inflation and record housing costs, while shareholders and C-suites struggle to decide between a private jet or a second yacht. And climate change is coming for all of us. Given all that, why the fuck should we care about some job that has literally never cared about us? Why wouldn't we get to pursue some work-life balance, and spend what little time and money that are being left to us on something that makes us happy?
Plus the increased work life balance has been proven by studies to be more productive because people working shorter hours and/or from home are more productive then the regular 40 in the office.
"But I can't recognize it by looking at it so everyone must be lazy" some rich jackass.
"I'm perfectly happy in my large, quiet office, sitting in my $2000 executive chair in front of my mahogany desk and using my private executive bathroom. I don't know what these people on the fourth floor are complaining about. We give them cubicles and a ping-pong table (do not use during work hours), don't we?"
Having done cleaning in offices such as these for at least one of the top companies in the world, I fail to see why even this sort of office is all that compelling. Look, a miniature golf statue...
They're not compelling to you and I. They're a way to show fellow executives how powerful you are. A huge office with expensive furniture means you're important.
He is mad because the pandemic allowed people to review their priorities and turn towards their personal lives rather than focusing on career lives. People today are less willing to work overtime, less willing to go above and beyond because they don't care about that. It means less money for the fat cats which is why they are bitching so much.
Yeah promotions don’t exist anymore, raises only come when you threaten to quit, and the only reward for loyalty is vacation time to use on getting sick. I’m not gonna show unrequited loyalty.
Over the course of the pandemic I lost my dad and had a baby. I also changed jobs and took a promotion. That really gave me quite a bit of perspective and my priorities absolutely shifted.
I was(am?) a very ambitious, motivated, "go-getter" who has moved up the ranks fairly quickly and am in a very senior leadership position for my age. I genuinely like what I do, so that definitely helps. But I saw an unqualified person take over my old job and is, at best, 'coasting' and more realistically slowly killing an amazing platform I had helped develop--and driving away incredibly talented engineers and analysts.
Leadership changed and just moved on to the next shiny object and seems content to let that platform flounder because...it's not their baby. Why on earth would you continue to move that invaluable platform forward when you can make a name for yourself on something else?
I don't want this to sound like sour grapes, because its not that. It's more that I realized, why did I kill myself for that job? The bigwigs seem to be totally fine cutting it loose. Why did I stress myself out to drive that platform forward so hard? Why should I kill myself, sacrifice limited time with my family to drive products forward when, as soon as leadership changes or as soon as I move on, it will get scrapped or forgotten about? It obviously wasn't nearly as important as they claimed it to be.
So, I am not killing myself for work. I am taking my entire paternity leave and not taking a single call or text from work. I am not going to work overtime. I am not going to work on my day off. I am not going to travel unnecessarily. I am going to prioritize things that benefit me personally. And I am not going back into the office on someone else's terms. (I honestly dont mind going in once or twice a week. I do less work in the office than I do at home tbh--as far as "work" goes its usually a free day. But I am fully remote officially and I'd probably hop to another company if they started to force me back in 'officially' because, like I said, I am prioritizing me and mine and commuting 45-60minutes each way, paying for parking, to sit on the same Zoom calls I can do at home, doesn't really benefit me in any way.
He's also slightly mad because he now has to compete in a labor market where people can choose between:
A shitty waiting job that has you flying out of town daily, pay is about as much as a gas station clerk, has you dealing with some of the craziest ideologies on the planet because no one respects your authority. High Stress, low reward situation.
Then you have work from home: Right off the bat, you get 2 extra hours back from your daily commute. If you have kids, you are now saving hundreds of dollars monthly on child care. Car care costs go down. Gas costs go down. Less stressful situation, and more mentally stable.
The problem isn't just that he is having to compete with work from home jobs, but he is now having to compete against the benefits of work from home. And there is only one way to do that: $$$.
If you have kids, you are now saving hundreds of dollars monthly on child care.
Myself and most WFHers know still put our kids in care, you simply can't work and look after young kids simultaneously unless you only work at night or during naps.
Frontier doesn't fly business. If Frontier is pissed off, it is because it is causing the legacy carriers to muscle in on the vacation traffic his company flies.
With my job I used to have to fly out and meet business teams every few weeks at their office. Now our business partners have staff working remotely so I no longer have to fly out to their offices as their staff aren’t there. That means we do everything via Zoom and meet more often and engage more directly than previously. It also means that I and my team no longer fly on an airline every few weeks. Everyone wins in this new paradigm except those that focus on business air travel.
Can we just fucking eat the rich already? How many useless cocksuckers do they need to stick a microphone in front of to call us lazy before we just fuck them all up?
It seems like a daily occurrence at this point that some rich cunt who hasn’t actually done any of the work that makes them rich is saying some brain dead shit like this.
Oh no, a crazy world event made people start caring about themselves rather than being the most efficient resource for you, their benevolent employer. Won’t somebody think of the CEO and shareholders?
What has gotten into all these rich pricks recently? I mean are they all of a sudden without PR folks to keep them from saying just absolutely stupid shit.
They have poor management skills in the first place and only really luck into where they are, because of this they have zero adaptability and all they see is a bill for unused office space and with all the easy money recently drying up investors are gonna put the squeeze on c-suite pricks who would rather shoot up prices than eat their golden parachute.
Middle managers are on board because, similarly, they don't know how to manage remote work and can't adapt, which should just mean their salary appropriately adjust downward but lol.
Economic calamity is currently happening, and the wealthy are about to lose after everyone else has lost for decades. They're just saying the quiet part out loud, blaming someone else.
I swore off Frontier long before this triple-chinned douche bag started bitching about unproductivity. The reason his company is making less money is not because his employees work from home, it's because Frontier charges fees on fees on fees. Passengers are sick of it. This is the company that charges you $25 to talk to a fucking counter representative at the airport. You have to pay for everything--seat assignment, overhead bag, carry-on, water, snacks. The only thing they don't suck out of your wallet is a fee for a stroller and a car seat, and that's only because law prohibits it. Fuck this guy and his asshole company.
Agree with your sentiment. This is totally off topic, but is there a lemmy instance that is uncensored? I know it's pedantry, but I really dislike seeing "removed" in place of female dog epithet.
Does he have actual evidence that employees have become less productive or is this just things he personally feels out of the case.
We really need to stop reporting every time one of these idiots says something dumb otherwise we're just going to fill the front page with "another idiot CEO made another idiot CEO comment" posts
At best the studies show there’s not much difference between WFH and in an office. Some show an increase for one or the other but on average it’s the same.
Probably depends on the worker but in my case productivity is way up. I spend half the time I used to spend commuting still on the PC doing work, and I don't even mind since I can eat dinner and relax the second I close my computer. They get an extra eight hours out of me as a result of WFH.
I question the 'less productive' part of his claim here
If I commute (2 hours, one way) the time I can spend in the office is bounded by how early I have to leave in order to catch the last train home. Not only does that mean a 5-day week involves 20 uncompensated hours, it literally limits my time in the office to about 45 hours.
Today, working remotely, I can bill 50 hours in the week and still see my kids. I get more done this way and they know it. If they want me in the office every day, they can pay me my hourly rate to commute
Big companies also have big investments outside of employees... such as oil and property investments. They don't want to hurt their other revenue streams.
I suspect all large employers are being lent on by the banks and probably local governments, to prevent a real estate collapse.
I can guarantee 100% every CEO on the planet would love to offload the cost of providing office space to the employees themselves . No shadow of a doubt.
Yet as you observe, lots of CEOs are on this message now, that employees should come back to the office.
I’m open to other explanations, but that it is mine.
Zoning laws are perfectly fine to keep unused office space from being used as housing, it really is that the CEOs feel entitled to your very existence and want to be able to monitor you 24/7 to make you're really working
Reminder that non-democratically (i.e. not 1-person-1-vote) elected CEOs are not only unnecessary, they're lazy and less productive:
In general terms, research shows that productivity in worker's cooperatives is higher than in conventional firms. For example, Fakhfakh et al. (2012) show that in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current levels of employment and capital if they adopted the employee-owned firms’ way of organising
People are still allowing non-democratic, unelected CEOs to run businesses, all this silliness, right?