Originally Posted by
texaspilot76
I guess it depends on who's viewpoint you see it from. If you are an airline employee, you hate Lorenzo. If you are a businessman, you see Lorenzo as genious. According to wikipedia, Lorenzo was given top awards for his acheivements as an executive. Obviously the business community likes his accomplishments. I can't comment personally, all I know is what I have read.
As far as Eastern, deregulation hit them very hard and they could not compete with the new low cost carriers. They needed concessions and the unions refused and fought hard until it eventually ended up sinking the company. These new cost carriers were doing the job for way less because they had way less overhead. There is always someone that will do the job cheaper.
Absolute and utter bs. Yeah, EAL had some tough times but nothing that would have sunk them until Frankie took over. Look at the airlines he mishandled and destroyed. EAL was doing ok competing with DAL until, I repeat, Lorenzo moved all profitable assests to his now scab airline CAL. There was nothing any of the unions could do, including paying to go to work. Lorenzo was hell bent on destroying the union and if he had to take an airline down, so be it. He did it at Texas Int'l, CAL, and EAL. Remember New York Air; taking assests from TIA and moving them to nonunion NYA. Talk to the CAL executive's family that committed suicide due to what FL was doing. Talk to the thousands of families broken and destroyed after years of loyal service to a fine airline. Talk to my mailman who lost everything from EAL, who had nothing to do with unions or whatever.
In the short run, could the unions have saved EAL-maybe, but only for a short time until Lorenzo figured out a way to "starve" them again.
And he did such a good job at running airlines that he is now barred by the DOT from every having anything directly to due with an airline.
Oh and BTW, if you want to submit your own name to wikepdia and list your accomplisments, it can be done. Instead go to Amazon and buy yourself a "Flying the Line, Part II". But then again, I forget that the Harvard Biz School model is to make the most money for yourself and have no ethics or morality in business and not care what is destroyed in your wake.