Business

Between Feb. 23 and Feb. 26, Alaska’s biggest regional airline has laid off 130 of its 400-plus employees.

At this point, the nine communities served by Ravn Alaska can expect fewer flights, though none of its destinations will be eliminated, a company spokesperson said.

The decision was unfortunate and driven by a lack of profitability on certain routes, Ravn Alaska CEO Rob McKinney said through the spokesperson. The privately held company has shared little else about the layoffs and impacts they will have on the rural Alaska communities it serves, or its three Lower 48 destinations under the New Pacific Airlines brand.

Unanswered questions about the future of the Anchorage-based airline abound.

“So everybody’s kind of on pins and needles,” said Alaska travel expert Scott McMurren.

He runs the newsletter Alaska Travelgram and has been following Ravn’s situation closely, including monitoring fares and routes. As of Wednesday, he had yet to see changes in Ravn’s schedules.

Jessica Caplan, a representative of the Ravn branch of the labor union Air Line Pilots Association, International, said in a post on the union website that the layoffs were “shocking and disappointing.”

“Even more surprising: management has not mentioned the layoffs in any communications with us,” Caplan wrote the day after employees were informed. “We are all impacted in some way when a layoff affects our fellow employees, our friends and their families, or us directly.”

She called for more transparency from Ravn management. She wrote that 22 pilots were among the 130 people laid off.

Her web posts were initially public, but are now password-protected for union members. Caplan declined an interview request and referred inquiries to a media contact who did not respond.

McMurren said whatever changes do come will hit Ravn’s rural destinations harder.

“So they have an outsized influence in the markets that they serve because, in addition to, you know, having the most traffic and so forth, they have the biggest planes,” he said. “The Dash 8-100 series seats up to 37 people.”

Smaller communities are otherwise mostly served by nine-seat planes, McMurren said.

“Think about places like St. Paul Island and Dutch Harbor and, you know, the communities that they serve: Cold Bay, Sand Point, St. Mary’s, Unalakleet,” he said. “And particularly St. Paul Island. They’re the only air carrier that flies out there on a scheduled basis.”

Michael Baldwin has lived in St. Paul, a Bering Sea community of about 400, for more than 40 years. He’s the school principal and superintendent, and also has a side gig offering island tours in his side-by-side. It’s an off-the-beaten path destination for birders.

“Yup, it’s the birding,” Baldin said. “We have a lot of birds out here that people pay good money to come see.”

During past airline shakeups, St. Paul has gone without regular service to Anchorage. The workaround, Baldwin said, was to fly to Dutch Harbor or Cold Bay, hope the weather held, then switch airlines to get to Anchorage.

“We really depend on that bigger flight,” he said. “There’s some days that we might have, you know, 15 people trying to get out of here.”

The reduced service can be especially problematic if someone has medical issues they’re trying to take care of, he said. Fewer flights also means fewer birders.

“It’s kind of going through the community, and we’re kind of worried about what’s going to happen, because when you lay people off, the next step is possibly cutting off services to places,” he said. “Whether that same schedule holds, keeps going the same, or they’re gonna change it again, we’re not sure.”

Baldwin just flew back to St. Paul from Anchorage on Tuesday. His original flight was scheduled as the layoffs were happening. The Ravn rep who called him didn’t explain why his flight had to be changed, but he said he assumed it was related.

The four-day workweek is proving to be the gift that keeps on giving.

Companies that have tried it are reporting happier workers, lower turnover and greater efficiency. Now, there’s evidence that those effects are long lasting.

The latest data come from a trial in the U.K. In 2022, 61 companies moved their employees to a four-day workweek with no reduction in pay.

They began it as a six-month experiment. But today, 54 of the companies still have the policy. Just over half have declared it permanent, according to researchers with the think tank Autonomy, who organized the trial along with the groups 4-Day Week Campaign and 4 Day Week Global.

Follow-up surveys help to explain the four-day workweek’s success.

Improvements in physical and mental health, work-life balance, and general life satisfaction, as well as reductions in burnout, have been maintained over the past year, says sociologist Juliet Schor of Boston College, who’s part of the research team. Workers report higher job satisfaction now than before the trial began.

“The results are really stable. It’s not a novelty effect,” she says. “People are feeling really on top of their work with this new model.”

Similarly positive results are emerging from other four-day workweek trials, including in the U.S., Schor says.

“Doesn’t happen by magic”

At a recent webinar, participating companies shared their experiences and tips for success.

“It absolutely doesn’t happen by magic,” says Nicci Russell, CEO of the London-based water conservancy non-profit Waterwise. “You can’t just drop a day and carry on as usual, because how stressful would that be?”

Russell says after some initial teething problems, they managed to find efficiencies that allow all 10 employees to take Fridays off. They keep all meetings to 30 minutes and make sure those meetings start on time. They block off focus time on their calendars — sometimes even declaring Monk Mode Mondays. They’re more mindful of the emails they send and of the time they spend going through their inboxes.

“I only do my emails now at certain times of the day. I’m not drawn into them all day, every day,” she says.

At the end of the pilot, the staff at Waterwise were unanimous in their desire to continue the four-day week. A majority said they wouldn’t consider a five-day-a-week job again unless presented with a significant pay raise.

“It’s brilliant for retention, which is super important in a teeny organization like ours,” says Russell.

No one-size-fits-all

One important finding, researchers say, is that there is no one-size-fits-all recipe when it comes to the four-day workweek.

At Merthyr Valleys Homes in South Wales, giving everyone Fridays off wouldn’t have worked, says Ruth Llewellyn, who led the pilot at the housing cooperative.

With 240 employees working in roles from customer service to home repairs and maintenance, they decided to keep their operations running from Monday through Friday.

“For us, the thought of dropping repair service for our tenants one day a week meant that we wouldn’t be providing the same service,” Llewellyn says.

Instead, employees work a variety of schedules depending on individual and team needs. Some have a set day off every week, while others are on a rolling schedule. Some employees work two half-days, and some still work five days a week but shorter hours, allowing them to drop off and pick up their children from school.

The teams found time savings in different places. Some of the trades staff found they could reduce travel time to and from the building supplier with better planning around which materials they needed. Customer-facing teams found they could address smaller issues quickly over the phone.

Employees are more motivated, employee performance has held consistent, and absences for illnesses have fallen, Llewellyn says.

Yet the company is not committing to the four-day workweek forever — at least, not yet. Hoping for still more data, it extended the pilot and will re-evaluate the results later this spring.

“We’re really hopeful at that point that we can make it permanent,” says Llewellyn.

Why companies fail

Of the 61 U.K. companies that joined the 2022 pilot, only a few have discontinued the four-day workweek.

At one small consultancy, although the staff reported improved morale and the company reported a boost in efficiency, there were problems managing client and stakeholder expectations, according to feedback collected after the pilot.

Researchers suggest that better external communications and more flexibility in adapting the policy to challenging conditions might have made a difference.

“There is a suggestion that the organisation did not give the policy enough of a chance, and indications of a change of heart on the issue from management,” the researchers wrote.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

While Alaska’s mariculture industry is small by global standards, production of farmed shellfish and seaweed in the state has increased substantially in recent years, according to a new status report released Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Applications for Alaska mariculture permits averaged about six a year from 2014 to 2018 but increased to about 14 a year from 2019 to 2023, said the State of Alaska Aquaculture report, issued by the NOAA Fisheries.

Oysters have been a pillar of Alaska mariculture for many years, and sales of Alaska oysters grew from about 4.5 million in 2000 to about 7 million in 2022, according to the report.

The other main mariculture products in Alaska are blue mussels and sugar, ribbon and bull kelp, the report said. In all, 42 invertebrate and seaweed species have been permitted for farming in Alaska, though finfish farming is illegal in the state, the report said.

Seaweed production has grown dramatically in Alaska. It went from almost nothing in 2017 to nearly 900,000 pounds in 2022, the report said.

The global seaweed market is worth close to $10 billion, according to a recent analysis. Production is overwhelmingly dominated by China and other Asian countries, and farmed seaweed is being used for various industrial and pharmaceutical purposes as well as for food, according to a World Bank analysis.

Within the United States, Maine is the leading producer of seaweed, with more than 1 million pounds of product in 2023 and more than 40 active seaweed farming sites in 2023, according to a recent report issued jointly by Sea Grant programs in multiple coastal states. But Alaska’s industry has grown sufficiently to bring the state to second place by 2023, with over 875,000 pounds produced from 30 active sites last year, according to the Sea Grant report.

The new NOAA Fisheries report notes that several initiatives have been launched in recent years to expand the industry in Alaska. The Alaska Mariculture Task Force, formed in 2016, established a goal of developing a $100 million industry by 2020.  In subsequent years, Alaska mariculture programs were granted federal funds to stimulate development of the industry. An important event occurred in 2022 when the Alaska Mariculture Cluster was awarded $49 million made available through infrastructure legislation pushed by the Biden administration. The cluster was formed by the Southeast Conference, a regional economic development organization.

NOAA and the state are in the process of identifying more areas suitable for mariculture through an Aquaculture Opportunity Areas program announced last year.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

U.S. regulators and nine state attorneys general are suing to stop the $24.6 billion merger of Kroger and Albertsons, the country’s two largest supermarket chains.

The companies have presented the deal as existential to surviving in the grocery business today. But the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Oregon on Monday, says it’s anticompetitive.

The Federal Trade Commission argues that Kroger’s purchase of its biggest grocery-store rival would form a colossus that would lead to higher prices, lower-quality products and services, and “eliminate fierce competition” for both shoppers and workers.

The companies have argued that together they could better face stiffening competition from Amazon, Walmart, Costco and even dollar stores. In fact, Kroger on Monday argued the FTC’s rejection of the merger would lead to higher food prices and fewer grocery stores.

“This decision only strengthens larger, non-unionized retailers like Walmart, Costco and Amazon by allowing them to further increase their overwhelming and growing dominance of the grocery industry,” a Kroger spokesperson said in a statement.

Kroger and Albertsons had cushioned their pitch to regulators with a plan to sell off up to 650 stores in areas of the country where they overlap. But the FTC says the proposed sale of stores is inadequate and “falls far short of mitigating the lost competition between Kroger and Albertsons.”

In the months leading up to the agency’s decision, some supermarket employees, state officials and lawmakers had argued the merger would reduce options for customers and employees, farmers and food producers. Unions — the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers International — have expressed concerns about the tie-up.

Ohio-based Kroger is the biggest U.S. supermarket operator with more than 2,700 locations; its stores include Ralphs, Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer and King Soopers. Idaho-based Albertsons is the second-largest chain with nearly 2,300 stores, including Safeway and Vons. Together, the two employ some 720,000 people across 48 states and overlap particularly in the West.

The FTC, which had reviewed the deal for more than a year, says in a press release that an executive from one of the two chains “reacted candidly” to the proposed merger by saying: “You are basically creating a monopoly in grocery with the merger.”

Attorney generals of Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming are joining the FTC in its lawsuit to block the deal.

The attorneys general of Washington and Colorado already have filed their own lawsuits to stop Kroger from buying Albertsons. But the companies’ plan recently won support of one local union chapter — representing workers in Oregon, Idaho and Washington — which argued that Albertsons’ owner would likely sell the company anyway, potentially to a worse outcome.

Kroger and Albertsons, trying to convince regulators that the merger wouldn’t reduce local competition, had agreed to sell hundreds of stores in overlapping markets to C&S Wholesale Grocers, a supply company that runs some Piggly Wiggly supermarkets.

C&S agreed to buy retail locations as well as some private brands, distribution centers and offices. The company said it was “committed to retaining” the stores’ existing workers, promising to recognize the union workforce and keep all collective bargaining agreements.

In recent years, many antitrust experts — including those now at the FTC — have questioned the effectiveness of divestitures as a path to approve mergers.

“C&S would face significant obstacles stitching together the various parts and pieces from Kroger and Albertsons into a functioning business—let alone a successful competitor against a combined Kroger and Albertsons,” the FTC says in its release.

When Albertsons itself merged with Safeway in 2015, for example, the FTC required it to sell off 168 stores as part of the deal. Within months, one of its buyers filed for bankruptcy protection and Albertsons repurchased 33 of those stores on the cheap.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The world’s largest pizza company is delivering something new to Anchorage: stunt marketing with a $25,000 grant for the city’s snow plowing.

“At Domino’s, we’re plowing unplowed roads across the country, because cold roads shouldn’t get in the way of hot pizza. Nominate your town for plowing assistance at PlowingForPizza.com.”

And Anchorage locals did put in nominations – a “significant” number, according to a spokesperson for the company.

The campaign started after Anchorage got its record-breaking snowfall in November, overwhelming the city’s snow removal system and shutting down schools for days. Snow in Alaska’s biggest city continued to break records in December and January.

“Yeah, so we’re the lucky winners,” Veronica Hoxie said with a chuckle.

Hoxie is a spokesperson for Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson. She said the grant agreement was signed last week, and that there are other procedural hurdles to clear before the money changes hands.

But when it does, what does $25,000 of snow plowing look like?

“In the grand scheme of things, not a whole lot,” Hoxie said. “But it is a fun little, you know, unique funding mechanism.”

It’s the equivalent of roughly 900 operator hours in the city’s street maintenance crews.

One condition of accepting the grant is that the city will share photos and video of its operations to be featured on Domino’s Plowing for Pizza website.

Household garbage fees in Juneau will soon go up by almost 9%, beginning on March 1. Meanwhile, rates for disposing of metal will rise sharply, with the minimum charge spiking from $40 to $110.

Waste Management is the private company that owns Juneau’s only landfill. Patrick McCarthy, a spokesperson for the company, said in an email that increases in operational and transportation costs led to the price hikes.

Waste Management has not posted the new prices on its website. McCarthy said they are handing out flyers with the new rates at the dump.

Jesse Hay owns a landscaping business in Juneau. He said he wants answers about why the costs have increased so dramatically — like, whether the landfill’s dwindling capacity has anything to do with it. The landfill is only projected to last another 20 years.

“The life expectancy of the landfill is definitely a consideration. If that is the case, then, you know, come out and say it,” he said. “Get in front of this and say, ‘Hey, look, this is why we’re doing it. This is what our long-term plan is.’”

Hay said the rise in dump costs will affect his customers. Come March, the minimum charge for household garbage and construction debris will rise to more than $150.

He’s also worried that changes at the dump will cause more illegal dumping around town. Just over a year ago, Waste Management nearly tripled its minimum disposal charge, while also cutting back on its hours. Residents can now dispose of their trash for just four hours on Saturdays. 

“I understand that business costs have gone up, but when is enough, enough?” he said. “I mean sooner or later, people are just going to start throwing their trash on the side of the road and letting the city or the state deal with it.”

City Manager Katie Koester said the city can’t control Waste Management’s rates. But she said that the city has seen a rise in illegal dumping since last year’s price increase — and she’s concerned that the coming rate hike will only compound the issue.