…to discover that some early employees of Southwest Airlines are not only millionaires, but are still working as flight attendants. “We’ve come all the way from hot pants to hot flashes,” says Sandra Force, who has been with Southwest since it began in 1971.

The Times always has trouble when writing about people who are not yuppie professionals. And this story has some hilarious (in a bittersweet kind of way) dubious assumptions.

1) It shouldn’t come as a shock that after working for 35 years at a very tough job, flight attendants are worth two or three million dollars. More people are millionaires than used to be, and anyway, 35 years is a long time.
The real story is that employees who work that hard and that long at other companies aren’t millionaires….and that CEOs who don’t work very hard or very long or very successfully or very honestly are paid annually in the tens of millions.

2) Why don’t these people retire? the Times asks.
Well, first because some Americans still work hard. But perhaps more importantly, if you retire at age 56, the age of one of the people interviewed, you probably have another 20-25 years of life expectancy…and $2 million isn’t really a lot of money to live off for two to three decades.

It’s great that Southwest treats its employees well and earns their loyalty as a result. And it’s certainly newsworthy. I guess my point is, it shouldn’t be.