US carriers create jobs after slump

Employment at US airlines rose 0.2 per cent in December, the first time since June 2008 that passenger carriers created more jobs to keep pace with rising demand for travel.

Hiring by companies such as Delta Air Lines is starting to show up in data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which said the industry workforce climbed to 379,651 from 378,953 a year earlier.

The job-loss streak was the second-longest for US airlines since the Government began keeping track in 1990. Full-time employment at passenger carriers has fallen by about 143,000 since 2000, Statistics data show, the equivalent of erasing the combined payrolls of Delta and American Airlines.

"They're beginning to add some heads in the customer service area, flight attendants and reservations," said William Swelbar, a research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's air transportation centre. "Everyone is looking in the mirror and saying 'I need to add here and there'."

American said yesterday it is recalling 200 furloughed attendants, expanding on the 368 recalls announced on February 9, and US Airways took applications in December for 420 attendant jobs. Atlanta-based Delta has added more than 4000 new employees over the past year.

November's employment total was little changed, according to Statistics, with a drop of 23 jobs. The record streak for declines in the industry workforce is the 31-month period from February 1993 to August 1995.

Airline payrolls shrank for most of the last decade as the 2001 terrorist attacks and two recessions sapped travel demand and dragged carriers such as Delta into job-slashing bankruptcies. The industry learned to operate with fewer workers, with employment dropping 27 per cent from the 2000 peak while traffic rose by about 15 per cent.

- BLOOMBERG