Alaska Airlines joined the Seattle International Film Festival this year to sponsor SIFF’s “Explore. Dream. Discover. Film” competition:
Competition Rules
The title of your film must respond to the question: how is your life different or better because of where you have traveled?Your film must include an Alaska Airlines element. These can include, but are not limited to the following:
· Competition title card (download here) must appear at the beginning of your film
· Our mobile app or mobile website
· Footage of alaskaair.com
· Airport footage including Alaska Airline branding and aircraft shots
· Existing Alaska Airlines advertising in market (if applicable) such as Billboards, print, etc.Feel free to be creative. You might even come up with something that we didn’t even think of.
Something creative they didn’t think of? You mean something like this?
Oops.
When the book is written on the fight for a $15 minimum wage, a lot of the credit for the movement’s success will have to go to Alaska Airlines for their belligerent abuse of their own airport workers at Sea-Tac. It was Alaska’s refusal to come to the table that prompted the SeaTac initiative, and it was the passage of the SeaTac initiative that helped pave the way for $15 here in Seattle and beyond.
Explore. Dream. Discover. Thanks, Alaska Airlines!
Henry Ford was a smart man. He not only adopted assembly-line manufacturing in his factories, he also paid his workers well, realizing they could prosper together.
Nowadays, nearly every employer is dumber than Ford. They all seem to think the economy is a zero-sum game, in which one person’s gain is another’s loss, so that paying workers less means execs and shareholders get more.
Except it doesn’t work that way in the real world. When you take away workers’ purchasing power, everyone loses, because you then no longer have a middle class customer base. No customers, no business.
How hard is this to figure out? It’s so obvious Ford didn’t have to think about it more than three seconds. Yet today’s business leaders and conservative economic thinkers don’t get it.
How do you explain that? Stupidity, I guess.
@1 Henry Ford was a smart man when it came to wages, but not for the reasons one might think: his $5 Day was all about reducing turnover and improving productivity, not creating consumer demand.
@2 Of course. Low-wage employers automatically experience labor inefficiencies because turnover is constant in low-paying, hard, dirty, and unpleasant jobs. Paying rock-bottom wages is costly to employers in several ways: They have to be continually recruiting replacement employees, they incur a lot more employee downtown and expense for training, workers are less productive because of job dissatisfaction; unhappy and financially stressed workers are more likely to steal from the employer, a less experienced and lower quality workforce results in higher losses from employee mistakes and more workplace accidents, and so on. Especially when the legal minimum wage is far below basic subsistence, an employer has to be pretty stupid to pay only minimum wage. In our area, where $15 an hour is barely sufficient to pay rent on low-end housing, the proposed $15 minimum wage should be a non-event because employers should be paying $15 locally regardless of what the legal minimum wage is. They won’t have an efficient and productive workforce if they don’t.
@3
They won’t have an efficient and productive workforce if they don’t.
The thing is, Seattle does have an efficient and productive workforce, without that $15 minimum wage.
Somewhere else you wrote that people will move away if they can’t afford to live. And yet people still come to Seattle to work, even without that minimum wage.
@3 Actually, I don’t entirely agree with you, Goldy. Ford was looking for labor efficiencies, but he also was mindful about creating consumer demand. He explicitly stated his goal that his workers would be able to afford his cars. And Ford fought heated battles with his business associates over cutting prices to expand the pool of buyers. They wanted to keep prices high and make a few cars; he wanted to slash prices and make lots of cars. Ultimately, he prevailed by driving them out of the company.
Nicely done piece. I don’t fly Alaska (greatly prefer Hawaiian) but Alaska’s labor policies would deter me in any case. Alaska’s treatment of its ground crews and maintenance workers is shameful. Corporations appear intent on vindicating Karl Marx.
Whatever gets me there nonstop without a red-eye timetable, I book.
And then there’s that credit card companion fare thing…
@4 You don’t seem to understand that many people in Seattle make a lot of money, and that’s why people come here. Seattle is awash in high-paying jobs. We’re a regional medical center, a regional legal center, a regional banking center, a gateway port, the home port of the Alaska commercial fishing fleet, a communications hub, the home of Boeing and Microsoft, and so on. Seattle traditionally is also a union town, so even blue-collar jobs pay well. There are hundreds of thousands of households here with six-figure incomes. That part of our local workforce is stable, efficient, and productive. By contrast, in low-paying airport service jobs, for example, turnover is extremely high and employee dissatisfaction is through the roof. For example, when Alaska Airlines replaced its union baggage handlers with contractor-employed minimum wage workers, some of the workers hired by the contractor were gang members, and passengers soon discovered their check-in baggage was being rifled through and their valuables were being stolen in the baggage handling process. You truly get what you pay for, and when you don’t pay a living wage, people are going to make a living one way or another.
@7 Go ahead, book a Malaysian Airlines cut-rate flight and finish your trip on a South Korean cut-rate ferry. Be my guest.
Funny how some people think it’s okay for businesses to bargain for the highest price they can get, but it’s not okay for workers to bargain for the highest wage they can get. All the basic theories about free markets are based on the idea that all parties to a transaction have the same bargaining rights.
@ 8
For example, when Alaska Airlines replaced its union baggage handlers with contractor-employed minimum wage workers, some of the workers hired by the contractor were gang members, and passengers soon discovered their check-in baggage was being rifled through and their valuables were being stolen in the baggage handling process.
Yawn. Some LAPD unionized cops are gang members. KC just suspended three unionized cops for alleged illegal activity.
TSA is non-unionized only for the time being and TSA has caught people stealing from luggage.
Unionizing people and paying living wages doesn’t keep a certain segment of society from doing bad things. Paying for more than you get doesn’t keep some people from stealing.
Try again.
@10,
Well, duh. You’re not going to get much traction telling companies that they and their products are worthless and that they’re all a bunch of losers. You will get a lot of traction saying that to low-skilled workers.
Very nice. Ought to show this little film to the world or at least wherever Alaska Airlines flies. Lays it on the line without getting all nasty about it.
@11 “Yawn. Some LAPD unionized cops are gang members. KC just suspended three unionized cops for alleged illegal activity.”
This is your response to the fact there was no baggage theft problem until Alaska Airlines fired its union baggage handlers and outsourced the work to a non-union contractor? If this were a high school quiz I’d give your answer an “F” grade.
@11 “Paying for more than you get”
The best example of this I can think of is whoever paid for your education, because you have a bumper-sticker retort for everything, but no ability to think.
@12 A lot of companies ARE losers whose products are worthless. Those of us who have been around for the last 60 years or so have witnessed a major decline in the quality and value of what Corporate America peddles to the consuming masses, even as the prices they charge rocketed ever skyward.