ReadOnly7

I figured it was 5 early and 20 late.....

Grumpyaviator

I wonder if displacement and downgrades will be announced soon. It seems like the next step in the FH playbook to escalate stress, fear and anxiety.

Lewbronski

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Know your enemy

Lewbronski

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Know your enemy:

Lewbronski

Know Your Enemy:

FAR121

Herb would be rolling in his grave if he heard of the company putting shareholders ahead of employees.

RJSAviator76

By giving the Company concessions and gutting our contract, we would indeed be solving their manning issues, and giving them language in our contract that would enable them to make the use of IROPS language look like child's play.

By telling the Company to pound sand and us taking care of our own, we let the company be the bad guy - they indeed own this. They can no longer brainwash the gullible via "we are family, cohearts and we've never furloughed" BS.

By telling the Company to pound sand and us taking care of our own, we also protect our contract which took a full contract cycle to get, and that's not even taking into account the -800 SL with contract extension and AT merger. How about maintenance? 2 full contract cycles without a contract and all of it while leading the charge in the industry to reward shareholders and investors.

Worse yet, in Gary's own words:



This goes completely against what made Southwest successful and I don't want to enable or reward that behavior even though I am both, a shareholder and an employee.

Finally, I realize where our gains come from. They aren't from the benevolence of corporate officers. They are from the grit of those who walked the pickets in Chicago and Dallas to bring us our 15% NEC vs. 0.7% increase in 401k match. I realize our famed Southwest Culture has died. By this action, Gary Kelly is simply emptying a full magazine into its carcass and then running over it a dozen times back and forth with his Bugatti. It doesn't mean that Southwest Pilot Culture has to die with it and get plagued by in-fighting and weakening. We control that.

We also control how much we fly and how much we pick up, if any. Ask a potential furloughee how would they feel about guys flying open time while they're without a paycheck or medical insurance for them and their families? At the same time, consider that our contract is built around open time, engaging in refusal to pick up open time would be a violation of status quo that would likely get this pilot group sued. How do we address this?

Well... we can say to hell with furloughees. Sucks to be them. We press on. We can have our own in-fighting and informal shaming. I don't see people with your mindset caring one bit... if you need 110 TFP, you'll get it and everyone else can pi$$ off. And we can justify it by saying, we're only maintaining status quo. Going forward into future negotiations, we will have a very fractured group.

Or, we can recognize the strengths and weaknesses of our contract ahead of time, and take care of our furloughees via an assessment. Pretty sure that assessment would likely be tax-deductible. Your NEC would be unaffected as you would get your contribution from the Company based on full pay, not any concessionary reduced pay if we took any concessions. There would be no infighting or shaming going on because each one of us would be chipping in to take care of our own based on how much we work, and seeing how much we are giving to take care of our own would likely make us angry and engaged enough to hold the Company and the union accountable for this come Section 6. I sure would want to be made whole and would demand that via contractual improvements.

I know that in good times, everyone will be your friend. But only in bad and difficult times will you get to see who your true friends are. By stepping up and caring for those who got chopped by this heartless corporation is how you breed unity, loyalty, and foster the culture that people like GK can't touch. By actually doing this, I know we'll have a pilot group wanting theirs come Section 6 and they'll range from the juniormost FO to the seniormost captain. That's playing the long game.

biggun

No way Biden does anything for airline pilots. In a Democrat controlled administration the fundamental belief is that the government must exert control. A democrat economy doesn't believe in supply and demand, commerce, or the rights of the worker. It believes in control. The real issue here are the fundamentals of the Railway Labor Act. The underlying principle is that is binds both parties to the negotiating process while insuring stability in air commerce, which is a cornerstone of both the US economy and our national defense policy (CRAF flying). Ever since 1926 it's been getting harder and harder to get released. Both sides can "run the act."

Biden doesn't know how to spell "economy." So, he needs anything and everything that produces revenue (tax dollars) to function. Anything that generates revenue directly and indirectly to the government will be kept alive, on life support if necessary so it can produce revenue to the IRS. Any threat of curtailing interstate commerce would threaten Biden's ability to generate tax revenue so he can then give it to the progressive squad and dole out free benefits to those that are too lazy to work.

Another words, you get the privilege of working under NMB mandated supervision while simultaneously funding socialized programs. Any gains you get, 4 to 7 years down the road will be given away to the liberals so they can fund more free stuff to the lazy among us. Congrats. Democrats win and pilots lose.

Airfare is 44.9% cheaper today since the Deregulation Act of 1978. Those reductions come right out of pilot salaries. Thanks Jimmy Carter! Another brilliant democrat.

A very very long time ago, democrats used to care about "workers." Airline pilots are not considered "workers." We are considered to be white collar professionals. The fact that we pay union dues does not impress Congress or any one particular political party. Congress isn't scared of pilots. They have nothing to fear.

If our pilot force was truly "nationally organized." We would have more clout and more bargaining power. But, then we'd simply be a bigger and more expensive "bureaucratic association" with unlimited budgets doing nonsense inside the beltway.

biggun

UAL guy here and former CAL pilot.

I have read everything that's going on at SWA. it would appear that GK wants to reward the shareholder at all costs.

Most airlines are "ponzy schemes" of sorts. I recall that during negotiations post 9-11 in looking at the books of Continental Airlines, that we hadn't paid a dividend since Feb 1968.

As I read the SWA publicly released information it occurs to me that GK places his loyalty first to his shareholders, likely his institutional shareholders. He sorta forgot that it's the employees that who take care of the job, take care of the customer, and after management takes care of the employees, then the employees can reward management with great job performance metrics. It's those metrics that really - ultimately reward shareholders.

My take is that GK thinks he's Gordon Bethune. Gordon never made a nickel unless he had a labor-cost advantage. But, he wants to do it right out in the open. Which is something different. He's simply telling you all this: "I don't want to bother with government rules/procedures" that would benefit my airline and my employees." That's too much inconvenience. "I would rather find it more convenient to simply put a gun to their heads and extract financial concessions."

On the one hand: GK could simply use congress and the tax-payer as a shock absorber to reduce financial impact.
And on the other hand GK would simply use the employees bank accounts as a shock abosrber to reduce financial impact.

Maybe GK is a lot more like Larry Kellner. Kellner was really good at that. He used the union and interpersonal relationships really well to push post 9-11 concessions. Union was fully infiltrated by scabs and management sympathizers.

KernelCU

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