Aloha alumni and an unemployment rule of thumb

A year after Aloha Airlines shut down its passenger service forever, we find that 20% of affected employees are still out of work, based on a state analysis of laid-off workers who have exhausted all their unemployment benefits. Aloha Airlines, even through its years of losing a lot of money, paid good wages and had a decent pension program. Any furloughed Aloha employee who decided (a) not to move away from Hawaii, and (b) not to seek a different kind of work, effectively made a decision to run the risk of not finding work at all. It is human nature that we do not ever feel comfortable working for lower wages than the highest wages we have previously made. And who would want to leave Hawaii? The lucky ones got aboard at Hawaiian Airlines, which picked up the lion's share of Aloha Airlines business. Some others were hired by Mokulele Airlines, either directly by the airline or indirectly by Republic Airways, which provided and crewed the jets, and which now controls the airline as well. Others did look for airline work elsewhere, and some former Aloha pilots are now working in Asia-Pacific or the Middle East. There is a rule of thumb, bandied about during normal economic times rather than in recessions, that the average professional, when thrown out of work, can expect to remain out of work for one month for each $10,000 of income sought. This is not a real rule, and in slow economic times it is reasonable to assume that finding a comparable new job will be harder than in busy times. But in the case of ex-Aloha employees, the general economy was not the main factor; the main factor was the shakedown in their own business. There is a lesson in this for people working in some other industries. In the modern global economy, anyone who makes good wages in the private sector is at some risk as a generation of managers who know more about cost-cutting than revenue-raising look for ways to improve the bottom line through outsourcing and downsizing, while companies that try to maintain a generous wage structure are vulnerable to rivals that don't. From the Roaring Twenties through the end of World War II, some 25 years, big city wages ran very high for performers in radio. Then television came along, and 25 years later when I broke into radio, it had become a notoriously low-paying medium. Newspapers are now being supplanted by the Internet and a more complex shake-up imperils newspaper jobs. In the auto industry we are seeing economic turmoil caused in part by the fact that Big Three sales no longer fund wages that are higher than those of non-U.S. automakers with factories in America.  If you don't work for the government, it would be folly to believe that your decent wages and comfortable pension will be there for you from now to retirement. The world isn't so congenial any more.