Airlines Tell Employees to Prepare for Difficult Times – The New York Times

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The $2 trillion stimulus bill that President Trump signed on Friday will prevent mass layoffs at the nation’s biggest airlines but it will not prevent a major restructuring of the industry.

The legislation provides $50 billion in grants and loans to airlines, money that is meant to cover employee paychecks and forestall job cuts until October. But even as they welcomed the help, airline executives told their employees to prepare for difficult times, saying they would still have to make tough decisions to get through the coronavirus outbreak and its aftermath.

The pandemic could permanently alter the industry, United’s chief executive, Oscar Munoz, and president, Scott Kirby, warned employees in a memo on Friday. Also on Friday, Delta Air Line’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, asked his employees to consider taking unpaid leaves from the company.

“If the recovery is as slow as we fear, it means our airline and our work force will have to be smaller than it is today,” the United executives wrote in their memo.

The airline warned that it planned to cut service next month by more than 60 percent and still expected its flights to be largely empty. As a result, United is likely to have to cut its schedule even more in May and June.

Mr. Bastian, Delta’s chief executive, thanked the 21,000 Delta workers who have volunteered to take unpaid leave, but encouraged more to join them.

“While this assistance is welcome, it’s important to remember that the relief package is not a cure for the unprecedented challenges we face,” Mr. Bastian said.

On Thursday, American Airlines’ chief executive, Doug Parker, struck a slightly more optimistic tone in a recorded message for employees, saying that the stimulus and the cash available to the airline would allow it to “ride through even the worst of potential future scenarios.”

One airline chief executive, Gary Kelly of Southwest Airlines, went even further, saying he was not sure his company would end up taking any money from the government. “It gives us another option,” Mr. Kelly said. “We have opportunities to raise capital in the private markets and now we also have that opportunity with the federal government.”

Stocks fell on Friday as investors who initially cheered progress on the Washington’s aid package saw further economic trouble ahead.

The package delivers direct payments and jobless benefits for individuals, money for states and a huge bailout fund for businesses battered by the crisis. President Trump signed it into law soon after trading ended on Friday.

The plan is the largest emergency spending program in the nation’s history, but some economists have said it might not be enough to counter the potentially enormous economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic. And investors also faced fresh evidence of the economic impact of the pandemic in the form of a consumer sentiment reading that showed a sharp drop in confidence.

The S&P 500 dropped more than 3 percent on Friday. Stocks in Europe were also lower.

The selling reflected caution ahead of the weekend, when bad news about the virus’s spread or further efforts to contain it could overtake the positive sentiment stirred up by the passage of the stimulus bill, Steven Ricchiuto, the chief economist at Mizuho, said in a note to clients.

“After the stimulus bill passes, and households and companies begin waiting for the government money to start flowing, news stories will resume a more negative tilt,” Mr. Ricchiuto wrote.

All told, it was a relatively good week for stock investors. Even after Friday’s drop, the S&P 500 remains up more than 10 percent this week, after a three-day romp for stocks on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

But the decline on Friday suggests that there is still little clarity on whether the worst is over for the market after weeks in which benchmark indexes collapsed amid violent swings.

“We were oversold and we bounced,” said Jeff James, a portfolio manager at Driehaus Capital Management in Chicago, crediting the optimism about actions from the Fed and optimism about Congress’ stimulus bill for the rally earlier in the week.

Still, he thinks that the underlying cause of the recent market turmoil, the spread of the virus, will continue to gnaw at investors in the near future. “We need to see the cases stabilize and come down and that could take some time,” said Mr. James, who invests in small and medium-size companies.

Consumer sentiment tumbled in March as the coronavirus pandemic wiped out millions of jobs and erased trillions of dollars in market value.

The University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment showed the fourth-largest monthly drop in the survey’s 41-year history, according to data released Friday.

Richard Curtin, chief economist for the survey, noted that two of the larger monthly drops — in October 2008 and December 1980 — presaged long and deep recessions. The other came after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005. The coronavirus is in some ways the equivalent of a hurricane hitting the entire country at once.

Sentiment fell even further at the end of the month, putting April on track for the steepest decline on record.

“As with so much else related to this episode, the numbers are going to get worse before they get better,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist for Amherst Pierpont, wrote in a note to clients.

The sharp drop in confidence is hardly a surprise. But it is another troubling sign of how the pandemic is rippling through the economy. If the economic collapse leads to a pullback in spending even among consumers who have not lost jobs and income, that could set off a downward spiral that could be hard to pull out of even when the immediate threat of the virus has passed.

A kind of caste system is developing around the coronavirus outbreak: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

As schools and day care centers close, many parents who cannot work from home are in a bind. Darlyne Dagrin, the mother of a 22-month-old in New Jersey, missed work twice this week when she could not find a friend or a relative to care for her son. She was told that “if you call out again, you’re out of a job.”

And distance learning has posed a problem for those with spotty internet access, or none at all. “Online, everybody gets to be on the same page,” said Betsy Rubio, who lives in Texas with her 11-year-old. “But if not everyone has good internet, like my daughter, you don’t. I’m concerned about her falling behind.”

Google said it had removed the Infowars app from its Google Play store. The app is part of the media company owned by Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist and conservative radio show host. Google removed the app on Friday after Mr. Jones posted a video disputing the need for social distancing and some of the isolation policies aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.

Earlier this month, The New York State attorney general issued a cease-and-desist order to Mr. Jones because of false claims on his website that his diet supplements and toothpaste could be used to fight the coronavirus.

Google also said it was donating about $800 million in financial assistance to help small businesses secure capital and continue to advertise through the company. In a blog post on Friday, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said it was providing $250 million in ad grants to more than 100 government agencies including the World Health Organization to disseminate information on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

In addition, the company said it was creating a $200 million investment fund to support nongovernmental organizations and financial institutions to provide capital to small businesses and was granting $340 million in ad credits to existing small and midsize business customers who have had an account with the company for more than a year

The coronavirus pandemic has created an immediate need for wealthy benefactors to fund nonprofit organizations that support people in health or economic distress.

More than a dozen philanthropists, including Connie and Steven Ballmer and Michael Bloomberg, offered tips on how to make the most of charitable giving in a time of crisis to ensure donations have the biggest impact.

Let someone else do the vetting. Give to established funds that act as clearinghouses to distribute donations. They have the experience and knowledge to mobilize quickly in a crisis.

Double down on regular charities. Money is rushing into coronavirus-related charities, but most other nonprofit groups are lacking in funds, too. Most have canceled their spring fund-raising galas, which can account for a significant part of their annual budgets.

Speed up long-term giving plans. Some of the largest gifts are made over several years. Now is the time to accelerate those donations.

• Everlane, the apparel start-up, said on Friday that it was eliminating a large portion of its staff as it navigates the effects of the pandemic. The company said it cut 222 part-time retail and customer experience employees and furloughed 68 full-time retail employees. Affected staff received two weeks of severance pay. Everlane said it hoped to “build our team back as the economy improves.”

• The food distribution company Sysco said on Friday that some of its employees who have been furloughed because of the coronavirus will have the option to work at Kroger locations for the next 30 days. Like many grocery stores, Kroger has seen a surge in demand over the last few week as panic-shopping customers have filled their shopping carts with shelf-stable supplies.

• Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California will remain closed “until further notice,” Disney said on Friday. Tens of thousands of hourly workers at the parks will be paid through April 18. NBCUniversal, which operates Universal Studios theme parks, said earlier this week that its domestic properties would stay closed until at least April 19.

• L Brands, the owner of Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret, said on Friday that it would furlough most store associates “plus those who are not currently working to support the online businesses or who cannot work from home” starting April 5. Associates will receive pay and benefits through April 4. Senior executives will also take a pay cut.

• The coronavirus could cause job cuts of more than one million workers in the global oil field services industry, according to a forecast from Rystad Energy. The Norway-based consulting firm estimated that the industry employs more than five million people, including drillers, engineers and technicians, and that firms will cut people because of plummeting demand, low prices for oil and safety reasons.

• The average national price for gasoline fell on Friday to a penny under $2 a gallon for the first time since March 2016, according to GasBuddy, the travel and navigation app. Gasoline prices have been falling steadily since late February as the coronavirus outbreak has curtailed business and leisure driving.

Reporting was contributed by Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz, Tiffany Hsu, Ben Casselman, Sapna Maheshwari, Stanley Reed, Clifford Krauss, David E. Sanger, Niraj Chokshi, Natasha Singer, David Streitfeld, Daisuke Wakabayashi, Mary Williams Walsh, Vindu Goel, Amie Tsang, Carlos Tejada, Kevin Granville and Daniel Victor.