Things Fall Apart?

Anyone who has worked at Frontier Airlines for the past 2+ years knows what the company and employees have gone through to ensure they have a place to call home. I know countless employees and the families of those employees that have sacrificed much to see their beloved airline succeed. Bankruptcy, pay cuts, lost friends, and broken promises are the steps involved for an organization in financial trouble to turn itself around and appear to be only a shadow of its once proud self. Some have said, and rightfully so, that this is the price of business mismanagement. For myself, Frontier Airlines truly represented the first employer that made me feel like a member of an extended family, that gave me a sense of ownership in the business, and gave me a voice.

Frontier Airlines employees are fiercely proud of their little airline. We know we are not the biggest or the most flashiest airline in Denver, let alone the entire country. We were not the highest paid or had the best benefits in the industry (far from it!). What set us apart was the camaraderie and the feeling that we were truly all in this together. A lot of people think that this is not "Show Friends" but actually "Show Business", that in the business world, the only thing an employee should be loyal to is a paycheck, because when the chips are down, the business will not be loyal to you. What set Frontier Airlines apart for me what that the business was operated largely with the employee's interests in mind and that if you take care of the employees, they will take care of your customers.

I started this blog because I had some ideas I wanted to jot down. I started seeing some cracks in the old foundation and noticed that ambivalence was starting to be substituted instead of compassion. People who loved coming to work now started to dread it. Work simply stopped being fun.

When thinking about what was going on at Frontier, the circumstances started to remind me of a book I read a long time ago: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Anyone who has read this knows the story of a villager named Okonkwo who rises to power of his tribe only to be exiled from the village after various misdeeds and one tragic accident. He later returns to find his village vastly different than when he left due to the colonization of the British which ultimately leads to his on self inflicted demise when trying to fight the conflict that one alien culture brings to another established culture. I can't help but notice the symbolism in that story and comparing it to the current events at Frontier Airlines. Does Republic Airways represent the British colonists? Does Bryan Bedford symbolize Reverend James Smith (no pun intended!)? Is Sean Menke actually Mr. Brown or Okonkwo?

The truth at the end of the day is that Frontier Airlines is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Republic Airways Holdings. A new culture is clashing with an established culture. What remains to be seen is if the new culture can succeed even if it means driving away the reason the original culture was successful, the employees. Based on what I have seen so far, the colonists have not succeeded in winning over the hearts and minds of the conquered.