Delta Air Lines seeks bilingual flight attendants

Atlanta based Delta Air Lines (DL) announced on Friday, October 15, they are hiring 1,000 new flight attendants for jobs starting in July 2011. This comes in addition to the 450 current Delta cabin crew who had accepted voluntary furlough, and were called back to work early next year.

The carrier has already received 85,000 applications for the new job openings, paying $1,746 a month during training. A Delta spokeswoman, Gina Laughlin, said that at top scale with 12 years of seniority, Delta flight attendants earn about $41,000 a year if they work an average of 75 hours a month.

Applicants who speak Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, and Spanish in addition to English are particularly in demand for Delta's international routes.

So far this year, Delta has also hired about 300 pilots and more than 100 mechanics, making it, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the only major network airline with increased employment levels in July 2010 over one year ago.

The upbeat job picture comes at a time when about 20,000 of Delta's current flight attendants have until November 3 to decide on union representation. As a result of their merger with Northwest Airlines, Delta went from having only 12% of its workforce unionized, to a current after merger 36%. That ratio will rise to over 50% if Delta flight attendants begin paying union dues, that are estimated to cost them about $43 a month.

A little more than a week ago, Dallas based American Airlines announced it is hiring back 250 pilots in November and 545 flight attendants later this month, about one percent of its workforce, and also showed a 5.6% rise in passenger traffic, compared with last year. At the same time, British Airways announced new non-stop routes, and a code share agreement with Iberia and American Airlines, while negociating a similar agreement with Japan Airlines.

News about positive employment and traffic growth figures has not translated into higher corporate profits, or greater shareholder returns for some of the carriers in the airlines sector. There are always winners and losers. For example, according to Marketwatch, while ExpressJet Holdings Inc. (XJT) led the pack with a +146% stock gain in the last three months, followed closely by Japan Airlines Corporation (JALSQ) with a +115% gain, AMR Corp (AMR), parent company of American Airlines was down nearly -9%, and Delta Air Lines (DAL) stock was down nearly -3%. Six month comparisons are even more disappointing. Delta Air Lines stock lost almost -21%, and AMR Corp lost over -31%.

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