The Human Resource topic that we selected is to analyze the benefit programs of four major airlines. Benefits are important to employees as well as their families, and can be a powerful recruiting tool. Benefits also play a major role in managerial decisions and wise benefit choices can have a long-term impact on the quality of life. Some characteristics of a sound benefits program are, they must have clear specific objectives, they must allow for employee input, they must be responsive to societal and environmental change, provide for flexibility, and there must be clear communication with employees. One of the main challenges that companies face are the overall costs of these benefit programs to the companies themselves, as well as staying competitive in hopes to attract high quality employees. Almost 40% or $14,678 per employee is spent on benefit programs per year.

American Airlines like many other airlines are facing many challenges in the HR area of benefits and incentives. American Airlines as we all know is one of the leading airlines in today's airline industry. This status reflects upon Americans benefit program. American Airlines realizes that it m

Some of the most effective policies and strategies for dealing with benefit programs are encompassed within each of the four airlines benefit programs offered. There are several benefits that are required by law, which include Social Security, Unemployment, Workers Compensation, and Leaves without Pay. Overall, American Airlines seemed to offer the most versatile benefits program. Although other programs offered similar benefits, we found that American Airlines offered the most conservative program. For example, United Airlines, and Southwest Airlines both offer free flights to all employees as well as their families, which may be more appealing to a young employee without a family. On the downside, we discovered that Southwest Airlines has a limited flight area, which minimizes their costs when employees take advantage of these programs, and allows them to offer these strategic benefits. We feel that American and Continental Airlines are overlooking an important strategic hiring strategy, by not offering free flights to all their employees, since cost of flights are fixed. For example, a flight that is only at 85% capacity will fly for the same price as a flight that is at 100% capacity. Continental Airlines, has a competitive benefits program as well, but it lacks the flight area which both United and American Airlines offer. We felt that American and United Airlines offered the best benefit programs, although American does not offer free flights from day one of employment, they offer many other compelling incentives such as, personal emergency assistance, vacation buying programs, credit union assistance, as well as flight discounts for their employees.

1. http://www.ual.com/home/default.asp

We believe that United is not very committed to diversity. It is obvious to see that United is trying to limit their benefit packages to those individuals that are not registered domestic partners. Some states still do not recognize domestic partners as legal binding marriages, and as a result, these individuals cannot receive equal benefits.

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Approximate Word count = 2403
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)