Mozam

Agreed.


Why would anyone come here to treated like a pack mule for the next 30 years . The HQ at this place hates pilots and that is not going to change anytime soon .

flyguy81

It’s been ingrained in my head to take the first upgrade. I bypassed the first avail last month due to vacation and no desire to be base locked for Etops. I got this bid because I won’t have to commute.

I was doing a 140 tfp avg so far this year with CKA pulls and a premium trip here and there. My days off will go from weekend to weekday but I won’t have to pick up anything and will make the same $ or more. So more days off at home, no commuting, and more pay. Disability, training pay, and sick time all pays at CA pay now.

If I commuted or lived out East, I’d still be a FO for QOL. If I were more junior or job hunting now…I’d be targeting UAL for sure due to where I live.

Lewbronski

What I don't get is how you have talked more than once here on APC about how you prioritize QOL and your kids over money. I totally get that sentiment.

When I've posted about our shortfall in career compensation compared to Delta when a SWA pilot flies an average of 95 TFP/mo, you've said that we make "more than enough."

However, if what a SWA pilot makes flying 95 TFP per month is "more than enough," why were you averaging 140 TFP/mo as a FO when that requires, if all of your additional flying was paid at premium, about an extra five days of work away from home per month?

It seems like your actual behavior is at odds with what you're saying. I've talked on here before about how we need to look at what people or the company or SWAPA does in real life as opposed to what they say. So, in your case, it seems like extra cash, even though you claim it's not that big of a deal, has been, up to this point in your career at SWA, worth working at least an extra five days per month away from your family and not hiking, skiing, or mountain biking - all of which you could have been doing during those five extra days per month if 95 TFP was actually "more than enough" for you. So, the extra approximately $9K/mo (pay + NEC contribution) that you've been making has been more valuable to you than five free days to do what you want with. That's totally understandable. A lot of people decide similarly. It's just that it seems like it doesn't agree with what you've been saying.

It seems like money is more important to you than you're willing to admit or maybe more than you realize. Could you please get on board with pushing SWAPA to go for industry-leading career compensation during this contract cycle rather than saying stuff like, "If I wanted A350 pay…I’d have gone somewhere that flies A350’s"? That way, more of us won't feel as much of a need to spend more time away from our families and can spend more time doing things we enjoy like skiing, hiking, and mountain biking.

MudhammedCJ

No f-ing kidding Lew! Some people you just can't reach.

SetMCT

Because unfortunately it's actually a whole lot worse at many other places.

flyguy81

Well I got 50 tfp “gratuity pay” for the meltdown added to the Jan pay (didn’t pick up anything that month). Lucrative reroutes in Feb made me a ton of $ along with a nice 2 day at premium and a CKA pull. March I worked 9 days with VA and CKA pulls. Some guys are working their butt off with 1 day off in 7…..no thanks.

If you had the opportunity to add a 2 day with a CKA with near 100% certainty that it will get pulled for pay…why not take the free $?

If I pick up a 2 day for Prem with a low TAFB, I’m not missing much at home. I look for trips with late reports so I can bike or ski and see the kids after school before work. What days I have off don’t matter during summer…I can do what I want during the week and there’s less traffic than weekends. During the weekdays I’ll do what I want and be home when they get off the bus.

I come to work to make $. I want reroutes and move ups. Chaos pays. The more I make at work, the less I need to pick up to keep my wife from having to find a job. I’m cutting back as a CA because I can make the same $ while working less. The reason I’ve been hitting it hard this year so far is to pay off all debt except for the house in prep for a strike, if it comes to that.

I’m a SAV yes vote and will not vote yes on the first TA just because. Just because I don’t need $30k a month like a A350 CA doesn’t mean I won’t take it if offered. That’s ridiculous. We work harder than any other NB pilot and deserve to be paid better than all of them. Like you’ve said though, The likelihood the union is asking for WB is prob nil so I’m not expecting it…and it’s not my line in the sand. Disability is. Fixing rsv rules is. Paid incidentals like medical/parking is. And a bunch of other stuff where we’re severely lagging OAL’s.

According to the Bob’s in DAL, classes are full and they’re planning 1100 NH next year. 🤦🏼‍♂️

GreenPatures

As I read posts and look at SWA it seems to me, complete outsider who had considered very strongly to go to a SWA class but chose another, that SWA is at a juxtaposition in its lifecycle. It embraced the values of its beginnings and yet is trying to become a corporate juggernaut at the same time and it appears it is failing at the beginning values as they may be more facade like than actual, and that it is at a crossroads in the other. The big 3 (I don't work for Delta) seem content in just being that corporate juggernaut and stop trying to play both sides. SWA seems to want to keep that small town, aren't you just glad to be here and enjoy our culture, mentality to pay low end rates hoping that the culture, that again seems a bit less shiny than it used to be because they are no longer the small upstarts with schtick but the largest domestic operator now, makes up for the pay difference, which has widened incredibly. So the culture appears to have declined or moved toward more "industry standard" in its sincerity due to the corporate growth and the pay gap has widened and that seems to put SWA's growth goals in a period of supply / demand challenges for pilots at odds with what it is actually doing... It is fascinating from a business observation standpoint, and from a pilot in the industry standpoint as well, but a bit shocking that the SWA corporate side seems to be missing the mark in so many ways these days. I may be completely out to lunch, and I hope I am. I have flown on SW countless times, loved flying them many times, very convenient, and definitely appreciate the differences in their model, just seems the corporate leadership is out to lunch. Please shoot holes!

Smooth at FL450

No holes to shoot. Fairly accurate summation.

Cyio

Well analyzed and fairly accurate. Corporate wants to keeps the myth and the legacy of the Old SWA and Herb because it keeps the old timers in check via nostalgia with a dash of “complete the mission”.

The problem is the old way doesn’t work anymore. The newer generation don’t have the history here and want to get paid, treated equally as their peers with work rules and most importantly, value qol, family time and free time way more.

Lewbronski

I don't know where to start.

In your earlier post, you simply said, "I was doing a 140 tfp avg so far this year with CKA pulls and a premium trip here and there," making it sound like it was no sweat to make 140 TFP/mo for you. Then, you add that you got 50 TFP added for the 15-day Gratitude Pay period. The Gratitude Pay was for time-and-a-half flying for the period from 20 Dec to 3 Jan - meaning you worked about 100 straight TFP to get 50 TFP in Gratitude Pay in the 15 days over the holidays? I suppose that's possible if you got stuck out in the system during the meltdown and had to miss a significant portion of the holidays with your family or you worked almost every one of those 15 days at close to an average of 8 straight TFP. Either way, that wouldn't have been an easy way at all to make an extra 50 TFP.

Then, you mention that you had vacation. Vacation definitely makes it easier to earn significantly more money in a month, especially if you pick up over vacation. But you can only do that during your vacation months. It's not something you can do consistently every month, especially when you've only been here seven years with three weeks of vacation.

As far as TR pulls go, I never found bidding on trips with CKA on them to be a reliable way to get TR pull. Almost always, I'd just fly the trip with the CKA with no TR pull for me.

And then the reroutes and chaos as a way to make money? The last move-up I had was back in July. Nine months ago. It's not something that I personally experience regularly even when I get trips that I think would be prime for a move-up (premium). I have gotten JA'd a couple of times in the same period. But that sucks.

And also, what time do your kids get done with school? If you're going skiing or biking before they get home from school, then you still have time before report to see them when they get home from school, and then drive to the DEN airport and make it there in time for report, it sounds like they must get done with school pretty early? The closest ski area to the airport is Echo Mountain, which is a 1+10 hr drive. Maybe you live close by? But if they're getting home from school after noon, when I have trips that report late enough to enable something like what you're talking about to work (rare), then they typically don't pay that well because the first day will usually pay DPM.

So, it feels like, for some reason, you want people reading what you're writing to think it's pretty easy to make 140 TFP at SWA with just a little extra work. But, in reality, for you, it took 50 TFP extra in gratitude pay (the sort of thing that almost never happens), vacation pay (and maybe vacation overlap pay and working over vacation - you didn't explain that), TR pull, getting lucky with reroutes, AND picking up premium. It wasn't nearly as simple as you initially stated: "...CKA pulls and a premium trip here and there."

Anyway...

The more important point that you raised is the likelihood of us achieving industry-leading career compensation is nearly nil. Obviously., I agree with you. But, as I've also stated the reason the chances of us achieving industry-leading career compensation are close to nil is because the pilot group doesn't support it.

For some reason, the pilot group doesn't care about a $1.3M gap over the first eight years of a SWA career vs DL and a $6.5M gap over 30 years vs Delta. The reason the chances are nearly nil is precisely because people like yourself say things like, "It's not my line in the sand." When you were polled, what did you say your minimum acceptable DOS pay raise percentage was? That's a rhetorical question.

Have you emailed, texted, or called your SWAPA reps, NC, BOD, and/or execs to let them know you want industry-leading career compensation in addition to all of the other things you mentioned that you want fixed? Why not? We can achieve it all if the pilot group demands it.

We're not going to close the 8-year $1.3M gap nor the 30-year $6.5M gap versus DL because most of the pilot group are like you. They don't really care about industry-leading career compensation even though in this negotiating environment it is ENTIRELY achievable and neither the RLA nor the RLA case law in absolutely any way bar us from being able to demand it.

Finally, I'm not going to tell you to not worry about building a massive strike fund but the likelihood of this place shutting down is exceedingly remote. That's not because the government might stop us from striking, it's because when the company is looking down the barrel of the existential threat of a legal pilot strike on Day 60 of a PEB, who do you think is going to blink? And, even if they do press to test and allow our dispute to go all the way into self-help, how long can they last with the airline shut down and losing >$60M per day in revenue, not to mention taking the intangible brand damage each day they allow a strike to drag on? A week? Two weeks? Three weeks? Every two weeks, they'd be out $1B in lost revenue and even more in lost future bookings as customer faith in the "LUV" brand rapidly erodes. It's not a bad idea to build a strike fund, but the likelihood you'll need very much of one is very, very low.