Southwest Pilots Union Schedules Strike Authorization Vote

When I was racking up free flights on Southwest traveling for work in the 1990s, it was still the old Southwest with "party seating", peanut snacks, cheap drinks, and singing flight attendants. I was drawn to that sort of culture, and I followed stories about it in the Wall Street Journal, which I got for free at my door every morning at my hotel. I learned at the time that its relations with its unions were unique. The airline was succeeding as a discount carrier, and its workers were willing to work for a little less to have secure jobs. Its unions were less adversarial and more inclined to look at win-win opportunities. If Southest prospered, so did its workers.

The last time I flew Southwest, maybe 15 years ago, things had changed greatly; they'd gone corporate, the peanut snacks, party seating, and singing flight attendants were long gone, while the company style had turned to talking down to the public like children. As far as I could tell, though, the unions had stuck with the program. Apparently the holiday-season meltdown has changed even this. Via Epoch Times,

Southwest Airlines pilots have set a “historic” strike-authorization vote, following a lack of progress in contract negotiations and a massive operational meltdown.

In a Jan. 18 announcement, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) said a vote has been set “beginning on May 1, and will ultimately give pilots the ability to strike.” The union, which represents about 10,000 pilots, said this is the first time in the airline’s 51-year history for such a vote.

The union’s vice president, Capt. Michael Santoro, in a SWAPA Facebook post, said the union is exasperated. He called the vote is “a tool we must employ to wake up management.”

All of a sudden, the pilots are playing hardball:

The union said it picked the May 1 date because it “allows our union time to prepare and gives our customers time to book elsewhere, so that they can have confidence that their summer vacations, honeymoons, and family outings are assured.”

The votes will be counted at the end of May, SWAPA said.

In the past, Southwest's unions would never have implied that Southwest's customers -- who were also their customers -- should maybe think about scheduling flights with more reliable carriers. You plan to fly this summer? Maybe think now about booking cheap tickets in advance with Delta, because we may be on strike here at Southwest.

But things changed over the holidays.

During negotiations, the union has been pushing the company for contract language to address “scheduling work rules and information technology,” SWAPA said.

Those were two of the major factors the union blamed after a winter storm touched off problems that led to 16,700 canceled flights during the holiday rush of the last 10 days of 2022.

As I noted the other day, Southwest management has backed off even the minimal acknowledgement it made during the meltdown that its outdated scheduling software was even partly responsible, although the specific triggering event, the memo from the vice president for ground operations to the Denver ramp workers requiring a doctor's note for any claimed illness, suggests Southwest's labor relations had been deteriorating prior to the meltdown as well,

I'd also noted that another vice president of the Southwest pilots' union wrote an open letter to Southwest's CEO on December 31 strongly suggesting the implicit deal with Southwest's unions was over. After all, the pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, and ramp workers were suffering just as much as the passengers. Some had to sleep at the airport, while they were also the ones who bore the brunt of customer dissatisfaction.

I was actually astonished at the time of the meltdown that Southwest employees appeared to be as supportive of the company as they were. I wrote it up to the fact that, especially among those who'd been with the company since the days of peanut snacks and singing flight attendants, they'd built up seniority and benefits that they'd forfeit if they went to another carrier, although there's a shortage of pilots generally.

But it looks like factors are changing. I knew the old Southwest was gone quite some time ago, and the old-time workers are going to retire very soon.