Aloha Airlines

Aloha Airlines, one of the three main airlines based in the Hawaiian islands, is dead. And of course, befitting a society with a plantation mentality (the idea that you gotta yoke yourself to a business or corporation or larger, non-state venture to be prosperous), people in Hawaii are sad.
They don’t know what’s going on. They are losing their family (and really, many of them saw this company not as a money making venture, but as a family and as a community).
They are losing their predictable futures — and probably their pensions, judging from what happened to other domestic carriers who went into bankrupcey.

Can’t say I blame them for this sadness. Of course, I could say: “told you so.” Or I could say: “Well, that’s what you get for depending on a soulless organization of profit hungry lawyers and paper pushers.”

But I won’t. I’ll just say: damn, that’s a shame. And then I’ll say: “Good work, Go!. Good work with that unfair competition. Of course, this should alert everyone to the absurdity of capitalism, and it should prove to Hawaii that we need an alternative to planes and Super Ferries. But it won’t. They won’t listen, because capitalism is the hegemony and all that.

Anyway, I will say that Aloha Airlines was 1) doomed to fail and 2) home to a lot of dedicated and emotionally attached people.

I found this out one day just before I came to Korea. Low on money and with a short time to work, I went out for temp work. I got a two day assignment with Aloha Airlines Human Resources.

Lord, did it fucking suck. Worst two days of my professional life.

Why did it suck? That’s not really the point, but I’ll just tell you this: the job site was in Mapunapuna and my job was to go through every HR file of every recently terminated employee — in order to find out their race/ethnicity for a EEOC audit of the company.

Here’s what the head of HR told the assembled temps: “You gotta go tru every file and find out what dese guys is. The best bet is a self-disclosure form. But lotta dese guys never filled one out. So after dat, look for a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, anything to figure out what these guys is. And I can’t tell you this… but we can’t be racially biased on this. So technically we can’t ID these folks on their races. But, I’m gonna tell you this right now: most of dese files, all we got is a picture to go by.

Now, in the spreadsheet program we used to classify these folks, the default racial identifer is “Asian/Pacific Islander. Smart, yea? So dat means you only gotta make a change to the files of people who aren’t Asian or Pacific Islander. That’s not a lot… cause it’s Hawaii, yeah?

You get like 5,000 files to go tru. And lot of them are out of order, so good luck ladies and gentleman.”

He was understating the “out of order” bit.

Anyway,  it was lame. They spent close to $75 each day to have me sit flipping through personel files, making up stories. And there were three people each day. They spent almost$1,00 on a completely pointless endeavor — which was made more costly and cumbersome for lack of inherent organization.

But I didn’t care, as I was getting paid to absorb fiction fodder. That was the rather awesome part of the job. I got to go through personal files of thousands of Aloha Airlines employees perusing their personal files. Everything the Corporation knew about these guys, I could know. There were some employees who’d worked for the company for 30, 40 years. I found one guy who was probably among the first hires. Actually, come to think of it, he was among the first hires. Straight out of high school with his shop teacher as a reference. He’d worked for that company for the entire span of the airline’s existence and retired after 20 years of semi-retirement.

It was amazing. Not just that these guys and girls had worked for so long, but the contents of their files. As I looked through file cabinets of history and lives spent yoked to Aloha Airlines, images of people crystalized in my mind. Not just images of their faces, mug shots stapled to brittle, 50 year-old papers. But images of whole people — how many kids, how many disciplinary actions, how many divorces and how many times they’d gone back to college looking to improve themselves.

My father works for a major domestic carrier. His company hands out “Orchid Letters.” They are notes from middle management congratulating a worker drone on a job exceptionally well done. My father is not proud to say so, but he gets them regularly, despite a deep ambivalence for his company.

Aloha gives out these letters of merit. It was strange to see copies of these bravo memos stapled into tick manila envelopes and on top of mug shots from a person’s far away youth. It was even stranger to read accounts of these extraordinary actions. Years of these good deeds went by before my eyes.

And now it’s over. That company — aside from the Air Cargo portion — is dead. Thinking about this makes me ambivalent;I don’t envy former Aloha employees their emotions right now.