United to furlough more than 16,000 staff

United plans to involuntarily furlough 16,000 employees on October 1, a day shaping up to be one of the darkest in history for the workforce of the US airline industry. The date is the first after the expiry of government protections linked to the federal bailout of the industry earlier this year. The number of expected furloughs put out by United on Wednesday is sharply lower than the 36,000 warning notices the company sent to employees in July. Thousands of workers had embraced voluntary departure programmes, both permanent and temporary, since then, the company said. United employed 96,000 people at the end of 2019 but CE Scott Kirby has been signalling since March that the airline will have to shrink because of the pandemic. Executives are still working out exactly how many people will work there after October 1. The US Transportation Security Administration said 516,000 passengers passed through checkpoints on September 1, down 75% from a year earlier. “In an environment where travel demand is so depressed, United cannot continue with staffing levels that significantly exceed the schedule we fly,” United said in a memo to employees. “Sadly, we don’t expect demand to return to anything resembling normal until there is a widely available treatment or vaccine.”<br/>