United came up short even on the in-flight video endings.

Both “Mamma Mia!” and “Battlestar Galactica” were cut off tantalizing moments before grand finales on my United Airlines flight this week from Chicago to San Francisco. And that frustration fit a broader pattern for me on United this holiday season. I found the airline—to which I’ve long been loyal—to be wildly inconsistent with its customer service, a sign of less-than-stellar management of the firm’s 52,000 employees.

Yes, the holidays are stressful for airlines and their employees. And they’re made more so when bad weather strikes, as it did in the past week or so in the Midwest. But that doesn’t excuse the way United failed to organize its bag-check lines effectively in San Francisco. Or the way one agent washed her hands of the chaos, saying she was going off duty. Message to passengers: We don’t really care.

During my journey back to San Francisco from Minneapolis on Tuesday, I got a different message: We don’t really care if we give you accurate information. The day started with a canceled 9:30 a.m. flight. If my wife and I had gotten a phone message about the cancellation and the later assigned flights, we might have spent time sledding with my nieces and nephews rather than killing time in the airport. I know United makes such calls. I got a canceled-flight alert on my cell phone on our way out to Minneapolis.

United might have called me Tuesday morning, but I don’t know for sure. No message was left. Then, when we spoke to a ticket agent, she said the cause for the cancellation was weather-related. But later, other United officials said a mechanical problem had led to the delay.

The sense of being lied to grew stronger during the day. First, the Minneapolis ticketing agent indicated that my family of four would be getting first-class seats to Chicago and business-class seats to San Francisco. As it turned out, she may have been fudging or woefully inexact: A United reservations official informed me later that just I had the fancier seats, not my wife and two kids.

In any event, United ignored any and all upgrade promises. No first-class seats for any of us to Chicago. And we barely got seats together in the back of the economy section on the flight to San Francisco. To add insult to injury, a gate agent in Chicago seemed to chide me for expressing frustration over losing any upgraded status.

There were moments of great service scattered throughout my holiday journeys on United: safe, competent piloting, for starters. Plus savvy, empathetic flight attendants.

But United does not get full marks on the subject of cabin-crew staffing. On the Chicago-San Francisco leg, our 747 jet was delayed for probably 30 minutes or more because the airline had to scramble to assemble just a skeleton crew of attendants. And the notion that the company was pinching pennies on labor was reinforced when we landed in San Francisco. Even though the plane was late and some passengers had tight connections, the jetway operation crew was missing in action, leading to another delay.

(I’m not sure if United hires jetway operators. But even if it doesn’t, it reflects poorly on United managers that they didn’t marshal one in time to meet our plane.)

I’ve flown United for years as my primary airline. I’ve stuck with them partly because I am sympathetic to the employee-ownership model they’ve tried. And United just announced a smart-sounding program that lets employees earn up to an additional $1,200 yearly for on-time performance.

But United clearly has something wrong in its culture. A recent federal report found it to rank 17th out of 19 airlines in terms of complaints per 100,000 enplanements during October. And this holiday season made me question if I should continue giving United the gift of my business, and wonder why the airline doesn’t seem to engender the same level of employee enthusiasm and service as other organizations inside and outside the airline industry.

The bungling was summed up for me by the way United botched the in-flight entertainment on our flight home. Just as a struggle between Cylons and humans was about to come to a head in “Battlestar Galactica,” the airline switched over to “Mamma Mia!”

A fine movie, but the crew didn’t time it right, either. Right before Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and others were about to sing another ABBA song during the film’s credits, the entertainment stopped. We were descending into San Francisco.

Maybe there a silver lining there. United chopped off the tune “Waterloo.” When it comes to people management and service, maybe the company isn’t quite ready to surrender.

Today was the last day on the job for Dave Morey, morning disc jockey at rock station KFOG-FM in San Francisco. But Morey and his crew offer an enduring lesson about keeping a team together.

Morey is wrapping up a 26-year career at the station. And some of the people who worked with him on his 6 to 10 a.m. morning show have been together 10 years or more. News guy Peter Finch, for example, has worked alongside Morey for 15 years.

Morey’s show has ranked among the Bay Area’s top 10 morning shows. And it is a factor in KFOG’s 11th overall ranking in San Francisco this year.

Morey is a force unto himself. His baritone voice, dry wit and calm demeanor were a big part of the show’s appeal. But it’s also clear the continuity of Morey’s team had a payoff. Whether they were bantering about the quality of rock songs, fielding phone calls from listeners or peppering San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom with questions, Morey’s team performed with a seamless flow.

The idea of people working together for a long period of time is under pressure these days. Not only are companies axing workers at a furious pace amid the economic downturn, but predictions about the future of work speak of transient, ad hoc teams.

For sure, employees in the same unit together for years can grow stagnant. And there may be wisdom to the notion of one-off teams to tackle projects that arise suddenly in a fast-paced business world.

But companies would be smart not to take the short-term orientation too far. Years of working alongside colleagues can build the crucial asset of trust, which in turn speeds up decision-making. It can make for a more satisfying job experience—which can boost individual effort and performance—as people build relationships.

And it can lead to the sort of flawless execution seen most vividly in the world of sports. Consider the success of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, who have won four championships in the past decade thanks largely to the chemistry of a stable group of players.

You also see the return on preserving personnel in music—in bands that flourish and change over time like U2 or the Beatles.

Rock on, Dave Morey. And may the spirit of your team live on.

By now, the only thing that should be surprising about economic bad news is that the experts are surprised by it.

Yesterday, the figure of 573,000 new unemployment claims blew past the 520,000 estimate from analysis firm Briefing.com. The payroll job loss tally from last week was a bigger shocker still. U.S. employers shed 533,000 payroll jobs in November, nearly 80 percent more than the 300,000 forecast by Briefing.com.

Briefing.com is far from alone in underestimating the severity of our troubles. Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal kept proclaiming the bottom of the housing market too soon, Salon.com columnist Andrew Leonard noted last year.

What’s an employer to do in the midst of this worse-than-expected recession? Business gurus call for counter-cyclicality—that is, avoiding layoffs or excessive cost-cutting; tapping the flush talent market; and stealing market share from competitors by going big rather than retrenching.

But as all the layoffs show, companies don’t seem to have the stomach for such bold moves. Or perhaps they don’t have pockets deep enough to pay lots of salaries now and wait for a payoff in the years ahead. Economically insecure consumers are following suit, reining in their buying just when the economy could use more shopping.

It seems clear government must kick-start the spending we need, and somehow reverse the pessimism that has come to grip both businesses and workers.

I’ve argued before that a stronger safety net can play a key role in righting the economy.

But only recently did I come across an eloquent defense of the concept by economist Alan Krueger. The Princeton University professor made his remarks in a New York Times essay back during the rough patch of 2001—but they have a prophetic ring given the series of billion-dollar government interventions this year:

“[U]nemployment insurance provides security for those who do not directly receive benefits. Just knowing that benefits are available in case of job loss inspires confidence. A strong safety net also makes it unnecessary to have industry-by-industry bailouts in response to adverse shocks.”

Little by little, the logic of beefier unemployment benefits seems to be sinking in. This week, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, called for suspending federal taxes on unemployment payments this year and next. She has proposed broader safety net reform as well.

Lifting taxes on America’s relatively small benefit payments is a small step. But it could be a crucial first step toward economic news that’s pleasantly—rather than painfully—surprising.

There’s lots of talk in these dark economic days about learning from the Great Depression. One lesson we seem to be missing centers on beefier unemployment payments to those out of work.

Consider what people losing a job got back in 1938 and 1939, the tail end of the Depression. The average weekly benefit of $10.94 in 1938 may not sound like much, but it amounted to 43 percent of the average weekly wage at the time, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics. The ratio dropped slightly in 1939, to 41 percent.

The corresponding figure for 2007 was 34 percent—and it has been 35 percent or less since 2004. A difference of six or seven percentage points can mean a lot of money. If the 2007 ratio had been 41 percent instead of 34 percent, the average weekly benefit would have jumped from $288 to $347 in 2007. Over a 26-week period, that $59 difference adds up to $1,534.

It’s quite possible those relatively higher unemployment benefits in the 1930s helped lift the country out of the Depression—along with the economic engine of World War II.

The Labor Department lays out the logic of the unemployment insurance system on its Web site:

“It was created in 1935 in response to the Great Depression, when millions of people lost jobs. They couldn’t buy goods and services, which contributed to more layoffs,” the Labor Department states. “Now, as then, the program helps cushion the impact of economic downturns and brings economic stability to communities, states, and the nation by providing temporary income support for laid off workers.”

Of course, exceedingly generous unemployment payments without any strings attached or efforts to help people get back to work can backfire. People can get lazy on the dole.

But the U.S., whose unemployment benefits are among the most miserly in the developed world, seems far from that dilemma. In fact, America may be missing a chance to bolster its faltering economy by boosting those stingy jobless benefits, which are part of an overall shoddy safety net.

According to The New York Times, economist Mark Zandi estimated several years ago  that increases in unemployment benefits produced about $1.73 in additional demand for every dollar spent, while tax rebates to all citizens generated about $1.19 for every dollar spent. Reductions in tax rates produced just 59 cents per dollar.

President-elect Barack Obama appears poised to launch big public works projects akin to the New Deal spending that Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to propel the U.S. out of the Depression some 75 years ago. But as hundreds of thousands of Americans find themselves out of work these days, let’s not forget the power of generous unemployment payments.