Our clients are increasingly running into the same problem: it’s getting harder to see what’s happening inside the workforces of America’s public companies.
Companies are publishing less quantitative workforce data. Some standardized sources have disappeared or become less accessible, while lengthy sustainability and corporate impact reports can contain plenty of discussion about employees without providing much information about workforce outcomes.
We’re increasingly helping clients fill in those gaps by connecting what companies disclose with employee sentiment, government records, labor data and other independent sources. The goal is practical: identify where something may be changing, which companies warrant a closer look and what questions investors should be asking.
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The airline industry provides a useful test case. Among six of the largest U.S. airlines, the average PeopleReturn Transparency Score fell from 46.9 in 2024 to 14.1 in 2026, a 70% decline. The S&P 500 fell by about a third over the same period. United went from 47.5 to 1.5 and Alaska from 54.5 to zero. Delta was the exception, slipping from 50.4 to 44.0.
These six companies employ nearly 490,000 people, with heavily unionized workforces and jobs where safety, staffing and operational performance are closely watched. Yet investors now receive substantially less quantitative workforce information directly from the companies.
Less disclosure doesn’t mean the underlying evidence has disappeared. In many cases, the data have moved: from corporate reports to government records, from company engagement surveys to employee reviews, or from sustainability reports to regulatory and operating data.
We brought those sources together for the airlines, combining corporate disclosure with employee reviews, health and safety data, federal operating statistics and 10-K workforce information. The resulting picture isn’t a ranking of good and bad employers. Different signals reinforce one another at some airlines and diverge sharply at others.
Southwest: operations recovered. Employee confidence didn’t.
Southwest shows particularly well how the information available to investors has changed.
For 16 years, the company published an annual One Report, supplemented from 2021 through 2023 by a standalone Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Report. Today, its reporting is primarily a web-based Citizenship site.
Southwest hasn’t stopped publishing workforce data. Its current People Data Table still includes gender and race/ethnicity representation, including leadership-level breakdowns, along with several years of training data. But much of the quantitative information investors could previously use to evaluate workforce outcomes is no longer there.
In reports covering 2023, Southwest reported employee turnover and hiring, including breakdowns by gender and age. It disclosed age representation across the workforce and leadership, as well as leadership representation for veterans, employees with disabilities and LGBTQ+ employees. It also reported quantitative board diversity data.
By 2024, only overall turnover remained from the hiring and turnover metrics, while the board diversity disclosure was gone. In 2025, the turnover figures disappeared as well.
The retreat extends beyond demographics. Southwest’s 2024 One Report disclosed results from two companywide employee surveys, with engagement scores of 77% in both the spring and fall, alongside quantitative wellbeing and inclusion scores. It also included a seven-year history of recordable injury and lost-time rates and extensive quantitative benefits data. None of those measures appears in the current reporting.
Independent sources provide another view.
Southwest was the highest-rated employer among the airlines we track every year from 2016 through 2021. Its employee sentiment score was 83.7 out of 100 in 2021, CEO approval stood at 94.6%, and 87% of reviewers said they would recommend the company to a friend.
Its 36-month sentiment score is now 73.0. CEO approval has fallen every year since 2021:
94.6% → 91.3% → 84.8% → 77.0% → 65.9% → 59.8%.
The underlying ratings show where perceptions changed. Management fell from 69.9 to 55.3 and culture from 82.9 to 70.1. Compensation declined much less, from 82.9 to 74.6, and remains among the highest in the industry.
Over the same period, Southwest’s operating performance recovered from its 2022 disruption. Its cancellation rate fell from 3.26% in 2022 to 1.00% in 2023 and has remained below 1% since. Its on-time arrival rate rose from 73.2% in 2022 to 77.8% in 2025.
The relative performance is more striking. Southwest went from 5.3 percentage points below the all-carrier on-time rate in 2021 to 1.3 points above it in 2025, moving from 8th to 3rd among the 10 carriers in our calendar-year comparison.
Overall employee sentiment uses trailing 36-month review windows and is converted to a 0–100 scale. On-time data are BTS marketing-carrier figures, which include regional partners operating under each airline’s brand.
The safety data provide another example of information moving rather than disappearing. Southwest no longer publishes the seven-year safety series that appeared in its One Report, but injury and illness records reported to OSHA still show the trend. Its recordable injury rate has declined from its 2022 peak of 16.3 to 12.8, but remains the highest among the airlines we analyzed and was about 1.6 times the industry rate in 2024.
Southwest’s Transparency Score, meanwhile, fell from 43.2 in 2022 to 16.0 in 2026.
The question for Southwest: Why has employee confidence in leadership fallen so sharply while operating performance recovered? What is management seeing in its own engagement data, and how have the employee engagement and safety measures previously reported publicly changed since 2024?
American: the signals move together
The picture at American is less divergent. Its Transparency Score fell from a 2023 peak of 62.7 to 12.0 today, while several workforce and operating indicators deteriorated over roughly the same period.
Its total recordable incident rate, calculated from injury and illness data reported to OSHA, rose from 6.34 in 2021 to a peak of 11.90 in 2024 and was 10.33 in 2025. The industry rate moved from 6.9 to 7.4 between 2021 and 2024. American’s DART rate rose from 4.84 to 8.99, while our severity measure increased from 289 to 490.
Employee perceptions weakened alongside those safety measures, with CEO approval falling from 62.7% to 48.3%.
American was also flying considerably more. Domestic flights increased 34%, from 736,000 in 2021 to 988,000 in the 12 months through July 2026, while its on-time arrival rate fell from 81% to 73%.
Those trends don’t establish that American’s growth caused the deterioration in its workforce or operating measures. They do give an investor several developments to examine together rather than in isolation.
The question for American: As American expanded, its injury rate rose, employee confidence in leadership fell and on-time performance slipped relative to peers. How is the board monitoring the workforce side of that growth?
United: lots of reporting, much less data
United presents a third pattern. The company still publishes an extensive Corporate Impact site and report, with substantial discussion of employees, programs and commitments. What has changed is the amount of quantitative workforce information available to evaluate them.
United’s Transparency Score fell from 47.5 in 2024 to 1.5 today, the steepest decline in the group after Alaska.
The independent data don’t show a corresponding collapse in workforce or operating measures. United’s employee sentiment declined between 2021 and 2024 but has been comparatively stable since. Its injury rate is below its 2021 level, domestic flying increased from 447,000 flights in 2021 to 826,000 in the latest 12 months, and its latest cancellation rate was 1.03%.
Lots of reporting isn’t necessarily the same thing as lots of information.
United demonstrates why we don’t interpret a falling Transparency Score as evidence that workforce performance itself has deteriorated. The decline means investors have less quantitative information from the company with which to evaluate that performance.
The question for United: United continues to talk extensively about its workforce. Why has the underlying quantitative disclosure largely disappeared, and what workforce metrics does the board use internally to evaluate whether those programs are working?
Delta looks different again
Delta’s quantitative disclosure has held up much better than its peers’, and its independent indicators have also been comparatively steady.
Employee sentiment remains the highest among the major airlines. Its injury rate stayed near 4 throughout 2021–2025, and it recorded the strongest on-time performance of these six airlines in every year since 2021.
There has still been some deterioration. CEO approval slipped from 91.8% to 84.1%, while Delta’s on-time advantage over the industry narrowed from 7.1 percentage points in 2021 to 2.8 points in 2025. Even so, the combination of disclosure, employee sentiment, safety and operating performance has been substantially more stable than at several of its peers.
Finding the data after it moves
No single dataset can tell an investor what’s happening inside a company’s workforce, especially as companies themselves publish less of it.
Corporate reporting shows what management chooses to disclose. Employee reviews provide another view of what workers are experiencing. Government records can preserve information on workforce composition, injuries, organizing activity and other outcomes that isn’t readily available in corporate reporting. Operating data add context about what is happening in the business itself.
The airline examples show why those sources are more useful together.
At American, several independent signals reinforce one another.
At Southwest, employee confidence deteriorated even as operational performance recovered.
At United, quantitative disclosure largely disappeared without a comparable deterioration in the independent indicators we examined.
This is increasingly the work we’re doing with our clients: finding the data after it moves, connecting signals that normally sit in separate places, and using them to determine where to look, who to engage, what to ask and what evidence to bring to the conversation.
American public companies aren’t becoming impossible to understand. But understanding their workforces increasingly requires looking beyond what companies choose to put in a report.
In other human capital news…
- More U.S. Workers Fear Losing Their Jobs to Technology Twenty-seven percent of U.S. workers, a new high, worry that technology could soon make their jobs obsolete. This is up seven percentage points from last year and roughly double the 13% recorded when Gallup first asked the question in 2017. (Gallup)
- EY Finds AI Buildout Cannot Be Financed Through Cost Cuts Alone To earn a market return on the AI build-out in its current projected state, the white-collar economy in upper-middle income countries and those with high incomes must either boost its output by 10.5% by 2031, or shed 16% of its labor costs. By 2035, output would either have to go up by 14.5%, or labor costs would have to go down by 22% (Bloomberg)
- What It’s Like to Work in One of America’s Data Centers Data centers are drawing intense scrutiny as Americans grow increasingly leery of AI and the technology’s potential risks. They’re also somewhat mysterious beyond their often boxy, nondescript exteriors: What’s inside, and what are workers doing? (Wall Street Journal)
- Equity Can Motivate Frontline Employees—If They See Their Impact on the Bottom Line Employee ownership can motivate frontline workers—but only when companies make the connection between daily behavior and financial value clear. In a new study, researchers found that concrete guidance linking actions such as safety and efficiency to equity growth reduced employee turnover by 13 percentage points compared with broad values-based messaging. (Harvard Business Review)
- The AI Race Isn’t The U.S. Vs. China, It’s A War For Human Capital New US visa restrictions are hindering the nation’s ability to attract top global talent, particularly in artificial intelligence. While China’s tech growth offers incentives for its talent to remain, tighter US visa rules for STEM students are significantly reducing the historical flow of Chinese AI minds to America. This raises concerns that political obstacles, not competitiveness, could undermine US leadership in the global AI race. (Forbes)
- AI Puts Critical Thinking at the Center of Workforce Priorities A new global study points to a disconnect between the skills Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) say AI requires and those employees prioritize. While 71% of CHROs identify the ability to supervise, validate and override AI outputs as the workforce’s most essential skill, only 29% of employees rank judgment as important. (IBM Institute for Business Value)
- The Invisible Way Companies Are Using AI to Set Salaries More firms are using AI tools to comb job boards for competitors’ salary ranges in an effort to pinpoint market rates. It’s an exercise made easier by the expansion of pay-transparency laws. Third-party companies now offer AI salary benchmarking as a service, helping employers understand what it costs to hire and retain people in specific roles. (Wall Street Journal)
- The True Cost of Corporate Scandals? Talent. New research tracking millions of career moves shows that corporate misconduct carries a significant hidden cost: voluntary employee departures. An analysis of 735 large public companies found that regulatory violations equal to 5% of annual revenue were associated with a 3.9% increase in departures. (Harvard Business Review)