ABX AIR Shake-up causes concern within company

There is no reason for employees to worry, the company president said.
WILMINGTON, Ohio (AP) -- Downtown Wilmington has a yesteryear pace to match its look -- tree-lined streets, county courthouse, a grain elevator nearby and the sedate campus of Quaker-run Wilmington College.
Up on state Route 73, the closer one gets to Airborne Air Park, there's a whole other city with bustling malls, office complexes, car dealerships and endless fast-food franchises.
Some say the city is most alive about 6 a.m., when workers at ABX Air get off work after sorting and routing more than 1 million packages for shipment across the country.
"This town never sleeps," said Pauline Buckley, an administrative assistant in the mayor's office of this city of nearly 12,000 people, about 50 miles northeast of Cincinnati. "Not since Airborne came here."
Deal
Buckley used to work part-time at the company, which came to town and bought a former military airport in 1980. About 6,200 people work for ABX Air, which became an independent cargo airline last month in a deal between its Seattle-based parent company Airborne Inc. and DHL, a unit of German postal service Deutsche Post AG.
DHL bought Airborne's ground delivery system for $1.05 billion. To satisfy federal rules prohibiting more than a 25 percent stake in U.S. airlines by foreign owners, Airborne and DHL spun off Airborne's Wilmington-based airline-delivery unit as a separate company, ABX Air.
The airline, which makes overnight deliveries nationwide under the name Airborne Express, is by far the largest employer in Wilmington and surrounding Clinton County.
Concern
ABX management introduced itself to industry analysts Thursday as the company begins operations as an independent entity.
It's only natural that a shake-up as big as the Airborne-DHL deal is causing some people to worry about ABX's future in the region, Mayor David Raizk said.
"People are concerned," Raizk said. "There's a lot of concern about transferring jobs to Cincinnati."
DHL has a similar but smaller freight-sorting operation at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in Hebron, Ky.
The possibility remains that some white-collar jobs could be moved to DHL, but overall ABX is hiring more workers, ABX Air president Joseph Hete said.
"The message we've tried to drive home to employees is, it's business as usual. Nothing has changed," Hete said.
ABX is adding planes to its fleet of 115 and continues to recruit workers, Hete said.
He believes the split from Airborne will benefit the Wilmington-based carrier by allowing it to directly control its fate as it tries to carve out a bigger share of the air delivery business in competition with others, including FedEx Corp.
"I don't think there is a downside," Hete said. "We've got the flexibility to go out and explore new avenues of business. Our primary focus has been to service the company that owned us."
Most ABX employees are part-time package sorters. Employees become eligible for family health care coverage by working as little as 16 hours a week. ABX even runs shuttle buses for workers from surrounding communities.
"We have significant turnover," Hete said. "It's third-shift work, and it's not easy work. But we find that once they make it through six to 12 months, they tend to stay with us."