How Juneteenth Finally Became a National Holiday

BY Michelle Jackson | June 18, 2021

When President Biden signed legislation this week making Juneteenth a national holiday, it marked the swift rise in recognition of the day commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. After decades of delay, the movement gained momentum last summer during the protests following the murder of George Floyd, when U.S. corporations began honoring the day as part of their commitments on behalf of racial justice. Why should it matter for all Americans? “African Americans should not have to bear the burden of this history alone. Nor should Black achievement be something that only African Americans celebrate,” wrote Kevin Young, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A year ago, From Day One published this story on Juneteenth's history and meaning:

Spring 2020 will be remembered in corporate circles as a whirlwind of change, with exhausting and exciting pivots by big business. Difficult conversations connected to brand identity and race were being held in the boardrooms of many corporations as weeks of Black Lives Matter protests unfolded.

One of the most intriguing outcomes from those conversations is the embracing of Juneteenth, which commemorates a unique moment in American history that many citizens may not have heard about before.

Many people are familiar with the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on Jan. 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln decreed that enslaved persons would now be free. Juneteenth specifically commemorates a day two and a half years later, June 19, 1865, when Gordon Granger, a U.S. Army general, relayed the emancipation orders in Texas, the last state where slaves were liberated.

Landing by ship in the city of Galveston, Granger read the order: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.”

The order, which affected the lives of about 250,000 people, is based on a document that was re-discovered just this week, according to the Washington Post. The National Archives on Thursday located what appears to be the original  “Juneteenth” military order, written “in the ornate handwriting of a general’s aide,” the Post reported. Given current interest in the subject, the Archives staff went looking for the original order, which had not previously surfaced, and found it. David Ferriero, head of the Archives, said of the find: “I think it’s terrific. I think the timing is just amazing.”

Over the years, emancipation day has been celebrated across the U.S., initially according to the date each state was liberated, but many historians track the modern, national version to a celebration at the conclusion of the Poor People’s Campaign, held in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Since then, recognition has steadily grown, with Texas in 1980 becoming the first state to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday. Since then, 45 other states and the District of Columbia have officially recognized the day.

With that in mind, it’s fascinating to observe how a small but growing number of corporations have responded by adding Juneteenth to the list of holidays and cultural observations that their organizations will observe. The timing of the uprising in favor of racial justice was fortuitous in presenting companies with an opportunity to give employees something symbolic yet tangible: a paid day off. Among the organizations who’ve said “yes” to observing Juneteenth: the National Football League, Nike, Lyft, Target, Twitter and Square.

There are a number of reasons why companies have decided to embrace Juneteenth:

  • Companies do not want to be perceived as tone deaf during tumultuous times.
  • It’s highly likely that these organizations already had employees focused on facilitating diversity and inclusion initiatives within the company and that Juneteenth was already a part of the conversation. Staff members may have discussed ways to show Black Americans and other employees of color that the company is interested in learning more about their cultures.
  • Corporate commemorations of Juneteenth may be a part of rebranding culturally insensitive language, visuals, or charactersassociated with the products that the company sells.

The corporate response to Black Lives Matter is probably influenced by the lessons learned only a few weeks earlier during the onset of the pandemic, when companies were challenged in their responses to put people first. When asked about how companies would be affected if they failed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis in an empathetic way, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, made the following observation:

“Their brand is going to get destroyed. I mean, how you treat your employees today will have more impact on your brand in future years than any amount of advertising, any amount of anything you literally could do. Because, again, we're all suffering from this. Every single person is looking to see how their company is treating them, how their employers are treating family members and friends.”

One could make the same argument that companies will be forever branded by how they did (or did not) respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, brands are already dealing with swift positive and negative reactions related to the stance that they take specific to the Black Lives Matter movement and any ancillary conversations associated with the movement. Those conversations need to go beyond the recognition of one day to encompass the daily lives of Black Americans on the other 364. Statistically, blacks earn significantly less than other cohorts. After organizations recognize Juneteenth, will that spur further dialog connected to employee well-being?

While Juneteenth is important, ultimately many organizations may find that most employees care just as much about the following issues:

  • Earning more and wage transparency.
  • Employee mobility within the organization.
  • Being treated in a respectful manner at work.
  • Microaggressions and how they affect employee morale.
  • Creating safe spaces to work in and having the ability to speak up without fear of retaliation.

In hastily rolling out Juneteenth holidays, corporations may be unintentionally making the mistake of focusing on creating a cultural fix within the company that might not be needed or wanted. As the flurry of companies observing Juneteenth continues, one is left to wonder who was in the room when making the decision to include Juneteenth in the company’s corporate culture.

Regardless of the intention, companies need to find ways to facilitate difficult conversations related to race and their corporate culture. Many organizations may find themselves ill-equipped to handle revelations they weren’t expecting related to how their employees experience their workplaces.

Ultimately by making Juneteenth a holiday, companies must also embrace the responsibility and reality that their employees will expect more from them and will want the organization to do better moving forward.

While it’s wonderful watching people discover what Juneteenth is, the reality of Juneteenth is that it’s a bittersweet moment to commemorate. Don’t forget that for an additional two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Texas remained enslaved.

That’s something to consider when you’re thinking about having your company observe Juneteenth. There’s a bigger conversation that has to be had about race and equality in the workplace. Will you be willing to have it?

Finally, there is this point to consider. In a note to colleagues, a senior global payroll manager of color had this to say about her company rolling out a Juneteenth observation:

"This is an incredibly generous display of thoughtful leadership. I know that as a start-up there is an immense cost associated with this and I am keenly aware that we are in a cost-saving environment. It is also incredibly difficult to navigate the environment in which we now find ourselves. I just wanted to lend my voice to say that with or without observing this particular day, this company has been incredibly gracious and effective in its acknowledgement of the struggles and issues that employees of color may be facing. I have had many discussions with my peers and what things boil down to for many of us is how history will record and remember our actions. Even more, how will we remember our actions when our grandchildren ask us about it.  I know that you will be able to look back at your leadership in a positive light.”

Your employees are watching and paying attention to the actions that you take. What will you decide to do?

Michelle Jackson is mission-driven to help her readers and listeners empower themselves financially, whether it’s by improving their personal finances or learning how to sell what they already know. Michelle runs the website and podcast Michelle Is Money Hungry and is the founder of the Money on the Mountain retreat focused on empowering financially single women, one conversation at a time. When she's not geeking out about personal finance, you can find her hiking in the mountains of Colorado. 

 

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The Roots of the Rage Against the Healthcare Machine

Most of us, sad to say, realized last week that we can comprehend the anger that drove 26-year-old Luigi Mangione—a privileged Penn grad and tech whiz—to allegedly murder Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, as the executive walked alone to an annual investors meeting in Manhattan.UnitedHealthcare, part of United Healthcare Group, which ranks No. 4 on the Fortune 500, is what’s known in the industry as a payer. That’s a term that might enrage a lot of people, especially anyone whose claim has been turned down for any of seemingly a million reasons and therefore is on the hook for medical costs. The payers are even using AI to process claims and make denials, taking humanity out of the process of caring for humans. Doctors say they are fed up with fighting insurance companies about providing needed medical treatments to their patients. In a manifesto found in his backpack after he was arrested, Mangione proclaimed: “These parasites had it coming.”The source of the shooter’s motivation is complicated. A product of a wealthy, well-connected Maryland family, a computer-engineering graduate with a master’s from Penn, he was social, and loved playing computer games and designing them. But he also suffered from spinal problems and severe pain that had led to spinal-fusion surgery. His reading list included anti-corporate tomes, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s screed. Six months prior to the shooting, he cut himself off from family and friends. They begged him to get in touch but he apparently went someplace very dark instead. He emerged a murderer, police say.The coldblooded killing of a corporate executive triggered a similarly coldblooded wave of public vitriol directed toward Thompson and his company. Yelp reviews from hell itself. Wanted posters with pictures of health-insurance executives began popping up on Manhattan lamp posts.We know the drivers of this heartlessness toward Thompson and his peers. Healthcare bills are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy. And our money does not buy healthiness, which Mangione noted in papers found in his backpack. The U.S. spends more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, yet in medical outcomes we are not even in the top 10. In a recent Gallup poll, the segment of Americans who rated healthcare quality as “good” or “excellent” dropped 10 percentage points since 2020, to 44%. Not surprisingly, respondents rated healthcare insurance coverage even worse: 28% rate coverage as excellent or good as opposed to 41% in 2012, the high point, says Gallup.One winner in all of this: UHG, which earned a net profit of about $6 billion. That was in the third quarter alone.The vicious response to Mangione’s alleged actions reflects both the state of social media and the state of corporate America. The former allows anonymous individuals to display the most vile aspects of human nature—and then amplifies them. The latter reflects industry concentration that leaves consumers with fewer choices, and to some degree, powerless and voiceless. And angry about it.That’s true whether you are buying eggs or chickens in the supermarket—and remember that food-price inflation helped drive voters to Donald Trump—cell-phone service or health insurance. The McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., where Mangione was arrested after an employee called the cops on him was flooded with negative reviews, as if a fast-food chain was part of the corporate conspiracy to suppress consumer discontent. Et tu, Mickie D?The UnitedHealthcare headquarters in Minnetonka, Minn., lowered its flags to half-staff last week honor of CEO Brian Thompson, who was fatally shot outside a hotel in Manhattan. (Kerem Yücel/Minnesota Public Radio via AP)Mangione spoke for many of these disenfranchised consumers, and in the worst possible way. You know this feeling of being seemingly without options. I’ve witnessed it at airports, when an angry, disgruntled—and clueless—passenger loudly informs a gate agent that “I’ll never fly this airline again.” Fat chance. You will, in fact, fly this airline again or you can drive across the country because Delta, United, American and Southwest control 80% of domestic airline traffic.This frustration is one reason that assaults on airline employees skyrocketed in the “revenge travel” period that followed the Covid pandemic. People were jammed into full flights, hit with multiple charges for seat selection, checked bags, early boarding, or whatever else the carriers could dream up. Is it any wonder that a number of them lost their shit? The problem, once limited to an occasional belligerent drunk, became so acute that the Federal Aviation Administration had to crack down on the growing number of miscreants, in some cases fining passengers $36,000 for attacking airline personnel.The frustration is everywhere and employees are feeling it. Recently I showed up at my local Hertz station in Manhattan to pick up my rental reservation; there were no cars. So I started getting agitated—and I am now practiced at this because this wasn’t the first time Hertz came up short. I was in mid-harangue when the agent pleaded: “I’m just a minion; it’s not my fault.” Fair enough. “But who else am I going to yell at?” I asked her. We’d both been through this before. Hertz had hung us both out to dry. The shooting is also a grim new chapter in our heavily armed society. We’re all too familiar with workplace shootings—going postal–in which a disgruntled employee or former employees take lethal umbrage on his boss and co-workers for whatever bad treatment or perceived slights they might have endured. But now it is seemingly the customers who are raging for revenge.This corporate assassination is raising the risks for everyone, from customer-facing employees to the big boss. But the CEOs will be able double down on their security; the front-line people will be more or less on their own. UHG’s employees, who number about 440,000, tend to like the company they work for. Until last week, the headquarters team labored in relative anonymity in Minnetonka, Minn. Now many of them feel they are under siege, likened to criminal accomplices working for a nefarious company. As one employee said. “[W]e all do the best we can to do a good job in the system we are in.”UnitedHealth, and other health insurers, have argued for years that consumers are well-served, and satisfied, by the current system. They probably have customer surveys that endorse this view. So do airlines. So what? Clearly the status quo is unsustainable. The anger that UHG’s system has generated has done what few issues in America can do: united Democrats and Republicans. Bipartisan legislation was introduced this week to break up some of the largest healthcare conglomerates by selling off their highly profitable pharmacy-benefit managers (PBMs), the drug middlemen often blamed for high prescription prices. The three biggest ones—CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx—control 80% of prescriptions in the U.S. “Critics complain that the conglomerates use their size and leverage to steer patients toward their own pharmacies, increasing costs for employers and government programs while driving independent pharmacies out of business,” the New York Times pointed out. Consider that the first round.This week I happened to have a lunch scheduled with the CEO of a healthcare-related tech startup, the source for a story I’m working on. He showed up without any security, and he didn’t plan to engage any. His company isn’t a “payer.” In fact, it helps corporate clients push back against the payers to lower their employee healthcare-insurance costs. Payers such as UHG hate me, the CEO told me, because he was attacking their profit machine. And Americans, as we now know, hate the payers even more.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.Featured photo, top: alleged murderer Luigi Mangione is escorted into a Pennsylvania courthouse this week (AP Photo/Gary M. Baranec)

Bill Saporito December 14, 2024

If the Boss Wants You Back in the Office Five Days a Week, They Should Think Twice

In its heyday as the proto–Silicon Valley tech company, Hewlett-Packard innovated by what became known as the “next bench” syndrome. H-P was a company founded by engineers (Bill and Dave) for engineers and new products happened when one engineer asked a fellow practitioner sitting nearby if there might be something else the company could make that could be useful to him.While this ask-your-office buddy ideation might seem quaint—after all, innovation can and does come from anywhere—corporate America is now demanding a return of sorts to the days of white shirts and pocket protectors. After a long, pandemic-induced experiment with remote and then hybrid work, the people in the C-Suites are apparently lonely.More and more of them want your butt back in the office five days a week, and they are going to get their way, leaving some very unhappy employees to stew about it. According to a recent poll by KPMG, 79% of CEOs see all the professionals back at their office posts in the next three years–that’s up from 34% last year. This will be distressing news to people who moved away from corporate cities like Seattle to places such as Omaha, which tried to position itself as a low-cost haven for remote employees. At least companies are providing some perks for your five-day-a week return: unlimited amounts of hand sanitizer, for instance, and cleaning wipes. Maybe some more free food.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is among the latest to announce that sitting in front of your laptop at home with your dog and your three year old no longer qualifies as getting it done. Some Amazon employees voiced outrage, even threatening to quit. “Go right ahead,” seems to be the response from HQ in what some have labeled a layoff by another name. Long before that, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon decreed that bankers and traders, who tend to operate in packs anyway, had to decamp from their Manhattan apartments and Manhasset manses to reoccupy the company’s pricey office buildings, especially its new HQ. Dimon’s argument is basically, “I’m not spending $100 a square foot to look at empty desks.” Nor does he believe that managers can lead effectively from home.Other financial industry bosses apparently concur. In Manhattan, where I work, office “busyness” rates reached 73.4% in August, a figure that compares occupancy to pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Nationwide, the rate is 60.4%, according to Avison Young, a real-estate advisory firm.What the Research ShowsFrom a productivity viewpoint, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to mandate a return to the office, at least not based on academic research. The data, for the most part, points the other way. In the largest study yet of working-from-home professionals, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found that employees who work from home two days a week are “just as productive, likely to get promoted, and far less prone to quit.” According to the job-finding site FlexJobs, employees who work at home at least part-time can save up to $6,000 annually on commuting and other costs—a back-door raise they are loath to give up.True, Bloom’s study was limited to an experiment on 1,600 employees at Trip.com, a Chinese travel agency. And an earlier study, of which Bloom was a co-author, determined that fully remote employees were 10% less productive than their office-dwelling counterparts.  Meanwhile, yet another study from the University of Essex in England notes that, while remote workers there put in more hours–including 18% more after normal business hours—their average output didn’t change much. “Therefore,” the study concluded “productivity fell by about 20%.”What Most Workers WantAny survey of employees, however, will deliver the consensus that, while they enjoy being with their colleagues, they love a workplace that can be molded to their needs. Parents with kids need the hybrid flexibility, and Gen Z kids may need the socialization of the office. They both want a little of both.The kind of CEOs who get driven to work and have large private offices don’t necessarily see it that way. Nor do they seem particularly interested in the workplace data that supports the benefits of hybrid work. They’re focused on another data set: current economic data, which is now turning in management’s favor. That data shows that layoffs are up, quits are down, and the unemployment rate is ticking up, if ever so slightly. (Recent hurricanes will boost unemployment, temporarily.) The pending election might also be causing people to lower their appetite for risk and stay put.There could be more than executive ego at work here, too. If you’re the big boss, you want to be able to see and hear, in person, all the people you are bossing, even if you recede to your office sanctuary for most of the day.Which means that job holders and job seekers are no longer calling the shots the way they did in the roll-your-own days of the pandemic.  In my shop, our CEO just upped the ante to three days a week in the office from two, citing the need for enhanced collaboration to tackle these particularly perilous times in the publishing industry. I get that need for collaborating on site, having worked as a print magazine editor for a couple of decades. But surrendering the now comfy confines of my home office for an additional day at the office feels like a loss.And for the germaphobically inclined, it’s not as though the pandemic is in the past; companies have just chosen to treat it that way.  When I pointed out to a colleague that Covid-19 cases are rising rapidly nationwide, the response was on the order of: Yeah, but the latest wave isn’t as severe as past versions and there are now vaccines and remedies such as Paxlovid. In other words, suck it up, cowboy.The 13 million Americans employed in manufacturing might find all this contretemps about office work a bit amusing. It might be possible to say, build a transmission in your living room, but the machining noise tends to be loud. Likewise for the people working in service industries from restaurants to retail to healthcare. Sure, you can consult with a teledoc, but that’s not going to help you when you need to be pried out of your wrecked car by firefighters and  EMTs. You want a first responder, not a chatbot. Nor will your garbage be picking itself up anytime soon.The Upsides of the OfficePart of me sides with the bosses. What the productivity studies can’t measure is that a significant benefit of going to the office is being at the office. Being social. Being part of a company’s culture, which is a living breathing thing, as opposed to being merely part of its labor pool. Sharing not just the work but the human interaction that attaches. Going to lunch with office friends. And yes, the water cooler gossip, even if water coolers have been displaced by kombucha or cold-brew coffee dispensers. Need we mention, too, that office romances can hardly be undertaken sans office?(One thing that isn’t coming back to the office is any semblance of a dress code. Want to show up for that meeting in shorts, a T-shirt and Crocs? Go right ahead, and I’ll try to take you seriously.)As for the office work itself, we’ve all experienced those moments when a bunch of people thrown together suddenly connect on a breakthrough idea or solve a vexing operational problem. Indeed, the power of in-person collaboration has been likened to having a free electron floating around the room, just waiting to give the particle of a fabulous idea the positive charge that gives it energy. That spark could come from a sideways glance, a brief, post-meeting chat, or simply by running into a colleague in the elevator or parking lot.There’s also a reason why companies brag about being a great place to work. Yes, you can be employed remotely, but that’s not remotely the same experience.Why We Need to Find a Creative SolutionThis current faceoff leaves office managers and HR in a bit of a quandary when top management demands to see butts in seats. Perhaps looking at the question from an either/or perspective is the wrong way to do it. What the studies on office vs. remote work can’t control for is an individual’s performance. A high-performing employee is likely to be high performing whether they are working from home, at the office or at the beach. The most successful employers will figure out the geography that suits them best.Some companies, such as the HR platform Workday, have tried to appease bosses and workers with a sort of hybrid-hybrid. The company’s “work from anywhere” approach allows workers to spend 30 calendar days in a 12-month period working from just about anywhere. They may be on to something. Think about benefits. In most firms, there’s a benefits “menu” that allows employees to select from, say, several health insurers and within those insurers a variety of plans.Maybe we need to offer menu options with remote and hybrid work–a variety of packages to people in different life stages. The parent package could offer maximum flexibility in return for extended work hours. Take your kid to soccer, but give us those two hours back when we need them. The Gen Z package could include an exercise program near the office or lunch at Chipotle; the older workers package could include a more private workspace or a wellness program. Or something called chronowork, based on a person’s’ own body rhythms, which suits someone like me, attuned to working vampire hours. Running through all of them is the option to demand that all of the people show up at the office some of the time—on demand, even.People worked in offices for centuries because a central location was the best way to organize and run a business. The advent of computer networks altered that universe, making a central location less relevant; the pandemic then completely severed the historic relationship between work and geography. Some CEOs are now trying to redraw the management map to match the 1985 version. It’s sort of like going back to fax machines. Yes, they still function, but new technology has rendered them obsolete.  The hybrid model, which is inclusive of the vast variety of people and work styles today, is the new tech of business organization. It’s work that can work for everyone.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.(Photo by Sam Edwards/iStock by Getty Images)

Bill Saporito October 23, 2024

Why a Software Glitch Sent Delta into a Tailspin: The Perils of Getting Technology and People Misaligned

Customer-facing airline employees are some of the most remarkable people in business. How can they not be? The workers on the ground face the annoyed, the demanding, the delayed, the furious, the not-going-anywhere-today, and the inebriated. Then they get a lunch break. Those on the jets face the entitled in the front and the cramped-and-cranky in coach.My admiration for these folks has only increased over the last decade as their ranks have been thinned by technology (with a push from the pandemic) while their tasks have been made increasingly fraught by the air-travel system in which they now toil. And in which we frequently roil.We got to see this combination of imperfect technology meeting overwhelmed staffing earlier this summer during the great CrowdStrike meltdown. Until its cybersecurity upgrade blew up, CrowdStrike was a company  known mostly to sys-op jockeys and hackers. Then the company introduced a wonky software update that within hours crippled millions of servers that used Microsoft Windows and all hell broke loose.Around the world, operating systems gagged, including those of major U.S. airlines, bringing traffic to a near standstill. In the U.S., only Southwest, which seemingly still uses floppy discs to run its data systems, escaped the meltdown. With the CrowdStrike collapse, the scene soon became all too familiar: lines of people desperately trying to get somewhere, their options narrowing, their frustration widening as the hours passed. Some would be stuck for days.And among those carriers, Delta stood out for coming apart like a cheap suitcase tossed down a baggage ramp. The carrier canceled more than 5,500 flights, and at one point refused to board unaccompanied minors, creating major angst for lots of parents. Meanwhile, word got out that CEO Ed Bastian had jetted off—Ted Cruz-style—to Paris for the Olympics while his airline was frozen in place. Delta blamed CrowdStrike and Microsoft, and has threatened to sue to recover some $500 million in losses. Microsoft, in turn, blamed Delta’s outmoded technology. During the depths of the outage, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian to offer assistance—talk about the ultimate Help Desk—but Microsoft says Bastian apparently didn’t respond. The carrier seemingly turned on its passengers, some of whom reported difficulty in getting hotels from Delta where they were stranded, as well as being low-balled by the refund offers being made to compensate them for lost flights and spoiled vacations. Delta’s service swoon seemed all that more severe given that the airline had reached cruising altitude in the post pandemic years, while rivals such as United and Southwest grappled more often with system freeze-ups.Using Technology to Supplant LaborYet Delta, as well as the other carriers, have been rolling the dice for years when it comes to matching people and technology. During the pandemic the carriers had to cut schedules (40% in Delta’s case) and jobs. As the nation and air travel recovered, they either didn’t—or couldn’t—rehire enough people who had left or were let go to match surging demand. (Remember “revenge travel”?) Increasingly, they relied heavily on technology to supplant labor. And they made us, the passengers, part of the labor force: encouraging carry on baggage by charging for checked bags, then introducing self-ticketing, self-check-in and self-bag-checks. Frontier even tried to eliminate its customer phone support.This latest air travel meltdown magnified an everyday incongruity that exists in the industry in that airlines are carefully configured to cope with the unpredictable—often to no avail. They try to plan for everything, from the catastrophic—a fatal crash—to the complex, such as a hurricane that threatens to spin the entire network into disarray. Then there are wars, revolutions, volcanoes, pandemics, strikes and assorted other calamities that are a regular threat to any global business, but to airlines in particular.At their vast flight operations centers, the carriers have teams ready for everything from a medical emergency on board to a rivet (or a door) coming loose on a 737 Max or a warning light on an Airbus 321 that won’t turn off. There are doctors, pilots, mechanics, meteorologists, Airbus specialists, Boeing specialists, avionics specialists, crew wranglers, airport and operations managers working 24/7 at the ops centers, and yes, people figuring out just who among us is going to get screwed when flights get delayed or canceled.Yet all of that preparation is no match for the way airlines are actually scheduled. They remain vulnerable to the phenomenon known as tight coupling, in which one unit in a system is highly dependent on the next. Cascading failure is almost a guarantee once the first fault is unleashed. Why can’t airlines prevent this from happening? The answer is that, despite the contingency planning, airlines are scheduled for optimum conditions, as though it’s always going to be sunny in Philadelphia, or Panama City or Paris. Which is not the case, of course. Worse, with load factors north of 85%, there’s little excess capacity, and little hope of a quick recovery once the system begins to implode.The contingency planning that airlines do can be undone by what they regularly come up against. Weather is by definition chaotic; technology is capable of catastrophic failure. Try building a service culture around that.Where’s the Service in the Service Economy?Although airlines are the most conspicuous examples of failing to balance people and tech, it seems to be creeping into all parts of the economy, as algorithms try to bring ever more precision to businesses. Especially in retail. The goal is to never have excess labor being employed for a single minute anywhere. In this frictionless world, there is always precisely enough help available to help you make your purchase or to get served.You know how that goes. We seem to live in a nation where there is always one fewer checkout lane open than needed (and don’t get us started on self checkout, which normally requires more than one self to operate). If you’re waiting in one of these lines, this understaffing can seem deliberate.Not too long ago, I was discussing airline operations with David Neeleman, founder of the highly successful new airline Breeze Airways (not to mention JetBlue, Azul, and WestJet) when he mentioned that he routinely passed by long lines of customers—or potential customers—at airport Starbucks. This frustrating level of service drove him to distraction—and this is a man who does not drink coffee. His point was that in an airport terminal, with scheduled flights, you can pretty much know how many people are going to be around your location at any given time. How can they not figure this out?, he asked, incredulously.Perhaps because they don’t want to: the obvious conclusion is that it’s better to be slightly understaffed than overstaffed, especially in businesses that ebb and flow during a day. In my nabe, the usual culprit is our CVS pharmacy, where the line gets 10 deep about the same time every day. Or at Chipotle, where 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. becomes a crap shoot as to whether your online order will be ready as the app promises. The problem? There are two hospitals nearby, and shifts are changing about then, something Chipotle’s scheduling software hasn’t seemed to have mastered. One more person-hour would do wonders, the difficulty being that you can’t schedule one person for one hour. So we wait.At Sephora, meanwhile, I seethed in a line on a Saturday afternoon with my wife as checkout terminals remained unpersoned even as the queue expanded. Spotting a manager, I asked, “Can’t you pull people off the sales floor? Isn’t everyone cross-trained?” She, of Gen Z, gave me that “okay, boomer” look before moving on. I’m still not sure whether she lacked the authority to shift salespeople to the front end, or the interest.Dissatisfied shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores are free to leave and not return, or to buy online. Dissatisfied fliers don’t have that option. How many times have I heard an angry passenger screaming, “I’m never going to fly this airline again,” at an agent and thought: Oh yes you are. And that includes Delta. The carrier may have burned some goodwill this summer, but there’s a still deep reservoir it can still draw on—at least for now.That includes its talent pool. As we have again experienced, when the technology chokes,  the front-line workers bear the burden for the company, because software doesn’t hear you when you scream at it. The airlines, and many other companies, either need to invest in more dependable technology—or they need to stretch their people a little bit less.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine, whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions and the myth of the “woke” corporation. (Photo by Panama7/iStock by Getty Images) 

Bill Saporito August 22, 2024