When the plane crashes, who gets a parachute?
What Spirit Airlines just showed us about pay equity
I had to do a follow up to my last issue of Lead With Inclusion because sometimes the case studies just write themselves.
Sometime around 3 a.m. on Saturday, May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines CEO sent an email.
It wasn’t a preparation memo. It wasn’t a transition plan. It wasn’t even a proper goodbye.
It was the last thing 17,000 workers received before the airline they’d devoted their careers to (and in some cases, decades of their lives) went permanently dark.
“We got no notice, no heads up, no emails, no ‘brace, brace, brace,’ which is our command,” said one flight attendant who’d been with Spirit for eleven years. “I felt like my whole world was snatched from my hand.”
And here’s what makes this story a leadership story, not just a business story:
While front-line workers were left with no severance, no health coverage, and no runway, SEC filings from the company show a different picture for those at the top. Documents filed in 2025 detail executive severance agreements worth $2.1 million for one officer and $4.275 million for another. Monies that were locked in before the shutdown.
Two sets of rules. One company. Zero accountability.
LEAD WITH INCLUSION
The pay gap isn’t just a number. It’s a value statement.
We talk about pay equity in terms of gender gaps and racial wage disparities because those conversations matter. But there’s another pay gap that rarely gets named with the same urgency: the gap between what executives take home when a company collapses and what everyone else is left holding.
In the case of Spirit Airlines, that gap isn’t a rounding error. It’s structural. It’s documented. And it was designed that way.
The IAM Union (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers) said it plainly in their public statement: “Our members on the ramp did not cause this failure; corporate mismanagement and poor financial stewardship did.”
The Association of Flight Attendants called on the federal government to intervene: “Spirit Flight Attendants are not just some asset to be written off in this process. Their lives matter.”
We still label employees as ‘resources’ — until it’s inconvenient.
Leading with inclusion means acknowledging that organizational decisions are not neutral. Who gets protected in a crisis is a leadership choice. Who gets a soft landing is a leadership choice. Who gets a 1 a.m. email and nothing else? That’s a leadership choice, too.
If your organization’s emergency plans protect the C-suite but leave everyone else exposed, that is your inclusion problem — whether you’ve named it that or not.
BE AN INCLUSIVE LEADER
Accountability Consistency means the rules apply the same way, regardless of the title on the door.
One of the five dimensions of the Leadership Reality Check is Accountability Consistency: the degree to which leaders apply standards, consequences, and protections equitably across levels and groups.
Spirit’s collapse is a case study in what happens when accountability runs in only one direction.
When budgets get tight, entry-level positions are cut first. When productivity metrics slip, front-line workers get performance-managed. When a company folds entirely, it’s the workers who absorbed the most daily risk — the pilots, the flight attendants, the ramp crew, the gate agents — who are told to check a restructuring website for next steps.
Meanwhile, the executives who made the strategic decisions that led to a second bankruptcy filing in August 2025 walk away with multimillion-dollar severance protections already guaranteed in writing.
That’s not a happy accident. It’s a system. And systems are designed by leaders.
So what can you do, right now, inside your own organization?
Ask this question: If my company had to make cuts tomorrow, whose jobs, benefits, and futures would be protected first?
Then look at the answer honestly. If the answer is “the people at the top,” you have a design problem — and design problems are fixable.
Inclusive leaders review severance structures, layoff processes, and organizational risk plans with equity in mind. They ask not just “what does the contract say” but “who does this protect and who does it leave behind?”
They also communicate. One of the most devastating details from the Spirit shutdown was not the lack of severance — it was the silence. Workers found out from an early morning email. Some found out when they arrived at the airport.
Transparent communication in crisis is an act of respect. Denying people that is a choice.
TAKE ACTION
You may not control the severance agreements at your organization. But you control something important: how you show up as a leader when things get hard.
Here are three questions to take into your next leadership conversation:
1. What does our current severance and benefits structure say about who we protect? Pull up the actual policy. Compare what executives receive versus individual contributors. If you don’t know, that’s a data point all by itself.
2. Do employees trust that they’ll be communicated with honestly during a crisis? This is a Psychological Safety and Communication Transparency question. If the answer is “I’m not sure,” that’s a gap worth addressing now, not in the middle of a crisis.
3. Am I applying accountability consistently? When performance gaps exist, who gets grace and who gets managed out? When resources are scarce, who gets protected? Patterns answer this question more honestly than intentions do.
If you’re not sure how your team actually perceives your leadership right now, the Leadership Reality Check is a free five-minute self-assessment that maps your leadership across five dimensions: Communication Transparency, Psychological Safety, Accountability Consistency, Inclusion and Fairness, and Change Clarity. Take it. Share it with your team. The gap between your self-perception and their experience is the most important data point you’re probably not looking at.
For organizations that want to go deeper — to assess not just individual leadership but systemic health — the Leadership System Health Index is a consulting-level diagnostic that surfaces the structural gaps that individual assessments miss. If Spirit Airlines had one, they might have seen this coming.
You know how to find me if you’d like to align your good intentions with leadership impact.
About Stacey Gordon:
Stacey Gordon is a Global Talent Advisor, Bias Disrupter and an unapologetic evangelist for inclusion. As the Founder of Rework Work, she works with leaders to anchor decisions in action based in three guiding fundamental management principles, while facilitating mindset shifts. She is a global keynote speaker, Top Voice on LinkedIn and a popular LinkedIn Learning [IN]structor reaching nearly two million unique learners who enjoy her courses. Want to work with Stacey live? Consider booking her for your next strategy mastermind session, conference keynote, leadership development meeting or consulting engagement.
