Originally Posted by
ren0312
Do JAL, Korean Air, and ANA pay their cabin personel less compared to Lufthansa, Air France, and British Airways? Plus I guess Northern Europeans have a reputation for being aloof and standoffish?
A lot of Japanese companies have pay scales based on age, not position, experience, and certainly not competence. Since many of the JAL and ANA cabin attendants and ground staff are in their 20's then yes pay is very low. I've met quite a few who said her salary was in the range of $2-3,000 a month. I know Korean companies work in much the same way, so while I've not had such in depth conversations with Korean or Asiana cabin attendants my suspicion is their pay is quite similar. I know in the pharmaceutical industry the pay in Korea is only about 10-20% or so lower than Japan, so quite comparable.
Having said that, the low salaries aren't limited to East Asia. Another close friend of mine is a cabin attendant for Qatar Airways and her salary is only about $2000 a month, she was too old to get hired by a Japanese airline (29 at application time) though, so more limited choices.
Originally Posted by
ren0312
Are Asian carriers allowed to operate in a free market. or do they get hidden subsidies, or are in the too big to fail because of national prestige category, I mean if Pan Am were an Asian carrier no offense but it would still be around for national pride purposes. Are US so bad because of unions? Or is it because of the riding public being so budget concious which poisons the entire well even up to the premium classes? I have seen Philippine airlines 7 across business class on the 777-300er and the hard product does not seem so bad.
The only major ones I've heard about being in serious financial trouble in recent years have been JAL and Malaysia. JAL most definitely got bailed out by the Japanese government and a lot of that was about national pride. They took a lot of penalties in operations as a result that have made ANA stronger now, important things such as Haneda international slots, etc. With Malaysia's current restructuring, there is plenty of discussion you can read in the "Other Asian Airlines" forum.
The Korean government (pretty heavily) penalizes their airlines when they make a mistake. For example with the Asiana crash in SFO and the Korean Air nut incident at JFK, but I've not heard that it puts either airline in financial distress when it happens. From purely a business perspective it would appear that these days most of the east Asian airlines are pretty well run in the free market so harder to say how much government involvement there could/would be if things went south. In the past there appears to have been a whole lot more protectionism but the markets are far more open now.