JAL Employment:

 https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210226/p2g/00m/0bu/022000c

Article:

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Japan Airlines Co. (JAL) said Thursday it will slash its hiring of new graduates in fiscal 2022 by 90 percent from the number that joined JAL group companies last spring, as the coronavirus pandemic is expected to continue putting pressure on travel demand.

The group will hire only 200 new graduates and forgo the recruitment of cabin attendants for its main carrier Japan Airlines in fiscal 2022 starting in April next year, while it will maintain employment of candidates for pilots and people with disabilities.

JAL, which has cut its international flights by around 80 percent, said in a statement it remains difficult to predict when the pandemic will be contained.

The JAL group hired 2,315 new graduates in fiscal 2020 and initially planned to hire some 1,700 in fiscal 2021.

But it halted recruitment activities in the middle of the year in the wake of the pandemic and decided to hire only 200 new graduates in the 2021 business year.

JAL rival ANA Holdings Inc., a parent company of All Nippon Airways Co., is also likely to hire only 200 new graduates in fiscal 2022, after usually taking on around 3,000 each year.

Ideas:

Its not surprising that JAL has decided to reduce it hiring for fiscal 2022 and the end of the pandemic is still not seen or unknown.

But at the same time its good that JAL has not indicated any real layoffs of its employees and or are not talking about it.

There was an article that mentioned that some JAL employees, flight attendants, were lent out to other companies as a way to keep them employed.

Last spring or early summer JAL or ANA had a flexible plan to reduce the work hours and or the salaries of some employees without actually laying off workers.

Yet when 80 percent of international flights are cut its hard to maintain the workforce even if you have good intentions.

However, as has been reported elsewhere, Japanese companies sometimes will keep the salaries somewhat low in order to build up some kind of reserve, to keep employees employed when the company hits some challenges such as the pandemic.

So maybe in that way JAL and ANA are able maintain most of their workforce without massive layoffs.

If you examine the Haneda International airport webpage and see the departures and arrivals for the domestic terminals or in Japan, you can see many cancellations but still a lot of planes departing and arriving. 

So while the international flights might have been cut, there are still a lot of departures and arrivals. 

But the questions is how full are those flights?

Talking to some Japanese who had taken flight for example from Haneda to Fukuoka and or Fukuoka to Haneda the flights appeared to be completely full.

Of course that might just be for the larger cities in Japan and not if the flights are to smaller regional type airports.

But then there is the question of what will the overall travel industry or just the domestic industry look like now with the use of online meetings between companies and clients instead of actually going to a company or traveling to another city for negotiations and other things?

That same maybe can be said for the shinkansen industry in Japan if more meetings are going to be taking place online instead at a business.

Have a nice day and be safe!