The other reality is, I think overall, I think this isn't just a Frontier thing.
This is a society-wide, we got lazy in COVID.
[LAUGH] I mean, seriously, people are still allowing people to work from home.
All this silliness, right?
I mean, all that's out the window, right?
So when you get people back in the office.
>> There we go.
Barry Biffle, the CEO of Frontier Airlines,
who is just complaining about we got lazy.
And by we, of course, he means workers.
And there he is laying into workers, people for staying home, saying COVID made
everyone lazy, also killed a million Americans, forgot that part.
He's bitter because I guess there's been a dip in his profits.
Domestic airlines like Frontier have been facing headwinds as demand for
international travel has outpaced domestic travel this year.
In August, the company reported in its most recent earnings call that its revenue
per passenger for the second quarter this year was $127,
a year-over-year decline of 9%.
You're also the CEO of Frontier.
Not everyone's scrambling to take a trip on your plane, bro bro.
But here he goes, there is more from Mr. Biffle.
Take a listen.
>> Speaker 1: Our overhead, when we look at overhead versus 2019,
adjusted for capacity, it's up dramatically.
Dramatically, why is that?
Why do I have more people per plane in overhead than I had in 2019?
It's because they're not as productive.
And so we're just looking at it.
And look, we're not alone in this.
I mean, you hear every company out there talking about the productivity challenges,
but enough.
>> Right, so there he is as CEO, abdicating responsibility for
the fact that they're not making as much money.
No, it's the productivity that has changed.
And yet, hey, this is fun.
Economic Policy Institute has a fun little graph to show us the reality.
The gap between productivity and
a typical worker's compensation has increased dramatically since 1979.
So, hey, maybe if you paid people adequately, they would be more productive.
Before I could get to you guys, obviously,
let's look at what people are getting paid at Frontier.
So Biffle's company, average Frontier Airlines salary ranges
from 32,417 a year for a flight attendant,
which feels very low, to 113 996 per year for manager.
Average Frontier Airlines hourly pay ranges from approximately $11 an hour for
passenger service agent to $26 per hour for flight attendant.
Not a lot, and so, I don't know about anyone else.
I'm a nervous flyer.
I don't wanna hear a CEO talk about productivity and
squeeze people who we already know have been squeezed, who are already tired,
who are already bleary eyed, who are already overworked.
Pay them what they are owed for an incredibly important job.
>> Speaker 3: All right, so that graph that we just showed you is one of only two
graphs that I put in Justice is Coming, my book that's coming out.
And I want you to understand the magnitude of the problem.
As I explain the book, it's got way more details in there.
But real quick, the difference between those two lines is $17,000 a year for
the average worker.
That means that your productivity is 17,000 higher than
the wages that they're paying you since about 1980, okay?
That means they're taking $17,000 a year out of your pocket for
every worker in America.
That is a stunning amount that corporations are taking from their own
workers.
And now, they're adding insult to injury by saying,
you're not being productive enough.
Now you wanna know one of the things that he was principally in fact,
is the only example he gave of productivity.
He said that his workers aren't getting enough money per passenger out
of the passengers.
Now how do you do that, by the way?
You shove the credit cards down their throats,
you make things harder to buy on the plane and you sell the sandwiches, et cetera.
An airline industry is a particularly miserable industry.
They have something called, literally, they have something called an index,
misery index.
And they literally try to make you more miserable so
that you will pay to relieve your misery, okay?
And so he's saying, these bum workers, they're not making you miserable enough,
so you got to pay me more.
I mean, it just can't get it's like if you put it in a movie, you'd be like, nah,
it's too much guys.
And his name is Barry Biffle.
No. >> That they wouldn't let in a movie.
>> Speaker 3: They wouldn't put it in a movie, it's so over the top, right?
So, but I'm gonna break it down a little bit more.
First of all, why don't you do your job and manage, so
I don't understand why these CEOs keep crying publicly.
They're like, everybody's working from home and I don't like it.
Well, you're allowed to say you're not allowed to work from home and you need,
hey, you're an air flight attendant, you got to be on the plane, right?
So I give that as an extreme example, right?
Why don't you do your job?
If you don't want them to work from home, you can say so,
it's not that big a deal, right?
But you don't have to go and insult all workers publicly.
I don't understand why they just don't do the bare minimum and
then just cry about it later and then blaming the workers.
Now when UAW says, hey, you know what?
We're gonna go on strike because GM, Ford and other guys,
they're making record profits and they're not sharing it with the workers.
What do the companies say?
The profits weren't because of the workers.
Now, when their profits go down though, what do the companies say?
The profits went down because of the workers.
Nah, come on, man.
And these guys all think that they're conservatives.
What happened to personal responsibility?
Apparently, that's completely out the door, Mark.
>> The other thing that's happening in the airline industry and
it's happening across media industries as well.
And it's really a problem, I think in America, as we look at an economic
landscape that it is radically changing, is a bunch of these mergers.
So the normal competition that would exist in the airline industry doesn't exist
anymore because you've merged these companies so
that they're only a handful of companies that sort of rule the day.
So they don't have to pay competitive wages because there just using
a competitive marketplace out there the way there used to be.
This is happening in media as well, I'm talking about corporate media.
So, yeah, I think there's a lot wrong with this picture, and
you've just heard a few of the reasons.
>> Speaker 2: And let's just remember earlier this week, remember the Australian
real estate magnate who had these choice words about workers demanding pay,
remember this?
>> Speaker 5: People decided they didn't really wanna work so
much anymore through COVID, and that has had a massive issue on productivity.
Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity.
They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and
we need to see that change.
We need to see unemployment rise.
Unemployment has to jump 40-50%, in my view.
We need to see pain in the economy.
We need to remind people that they work for the employer,
not the other way around.
>> Speaker 2: Well, it turns out, after a lot of backlash,
that dude Tim Gurner apologized from his third vacation home.
He stated, at the AFR Property Summit this week, I made some remarks about
unemployment and productivity in Australia that I deeply regret and were wrong.
There are clearly important conversations to have in this environment of high
inflation, pricing pressures on housing and rentals due to lack of supply, and
other cost of living issues.
My comments were insensitive to employees, tradies, and families across Australia who
are affected by these cost of living pressures and job losses.
I wanna be clear, I do appreciate that when someone loses their job,
it has profound impact on them and their family.
And I sincerely regret that my words did not convey empathy for
those in that situation.
However, and this is what I'm adding, I'm just looking out for
my stock portfolio and you don't matter.
You're a blip.
Yeah, bro, you and your family are a little blip, sorry.
But like empathy and stuff, empathy, blah, blah, blah.
Give me more money, more return on my investment.
This is just wild.
I mean, there needs to be a 40 to 50% jump in unemployment.
I know this is an older story,
but guys, I guess the last thing we can say on this is about COVID.
I think a lot of people came out of COVID understanding that they were being put
in harm's way by their employer, that they were being overworked.
And once they got any glimpse of, hey, it doesn't have to be this way either,
you can work from home and be as productive.
You can work fewer days and be as productive,
or your boss actually doesn't care about you, as evidenced by the fact that they're
putting you in the pathway of a deadly pandemic.
Yeah, people rearrange their priorities a little bit, so
it's incredible that that does not break through to some of these CEOs.
>> Speaker 3: Yeah, so my last couple of thoughts here are, one,
I do believe him on one thing, he deeply regrets it.
Is it because he offended people and he's worried about breaking their hearts?
No, he realized my God, I'm in trouble.
Wait, I could lose my great job.
I like being the CEO and lording over people.
Imagine if I was part of the masses.
No, I deeply regret it.
I deeply regret it.
Okay, yeah, I got it, brother.
That was the most lack of credibility, that apology had no credibility at all.
None, zero.
And it didn't even sound like an apology.
By the way, there's one quick little thing here.
Now, that's Australia and the other guys in the airline industry,
but part of the reason that a lot of people in the business world are trying to
push everybody back to work is because commercial real estate is in massive
trouble.
So anyone in any way related to real estate is like, everybody, back to work.
Back to work, you don't work from home.
Don't work from home.
So that's an underlying thing that no one ever tells you.
CNBC is never gonna tell you that, right?
But it's actually part of the reason why some of those regional banks started going
under, cuz how badly commercial real estate is hurt.
So sometimes those macro business trends get shown in this way
where they start yelling at their workers, et cetera.
And the last thing I'll say about the workers, I mean,
look, I run this company, right?
I don't think asking for hard work is a bad thing.
I think that there's great value in that, and I think that we work together as
a team, and I think that's great, but there's a trade off.
If you're gonna ask for hard work from people, you have to value them,
you have to respect them, and you have to empower them.
You can't just yell at them and be like, yeah, you're worthless, you're useless.
Whenever I lose money, it's your fault, and then go, now back to the mines, right?
No, no deal.
All right, treat them like decent human beings.
Work together as an actual team, give them some degree of power.
And then we're having a conversation about hard work.
But who wants to work hard for Barry effin Biffle?
>> Speaker 4: Well, to Cenk's point, that's a real estate company,
the Australian guy is CEO of.
And it was almost worse than get back to the mines.
It was we need to get a lot of people out of work to make them crave working in
this environment.
That was a pretty brutal, it reminded me how CEOs are surrounded by yes people.
They get so comfortable sharing their thoughts because they're always agreed
with and all of a sudden, he drops his guard.
He says what he's really thinking, and then he's on the apology train.