Advertisement
This is member-exclusive content
icon/ui/info filled

businessAirlines

Cancellations, vaccines and lawsuits: How the pandemic has fractured love between Southwest, unions

Pilots say they are fed up after a summer of disrupted operations, but tension between labor and management has been growing since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

While Southwest Airlines pilots insist they didn’t walk off the job last weekend to protest a vaccine mandate, their union president Casey Murray isn’t surprised the Dallas-based company is seeing more workers call in sick or request days off because of fatigue.

Data the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association shared Tuesday with members showed that more pilots are calling in sick to work compared to October in previous years. Pilots, citing fatigue, are on track for their second-worst month of calling out.

The record was set in August.

Advertisement
Aviation News

Stay prepared. Receive the latest airlines news, delivered straight to your inbox.

Or with:

“Where Southwest has failed is that this is happening more and more frequently,” Murray said. “It happened all summer, it happened again and again, and the excuse is always weather.”

Southwest Airlines has a reputation for its strong relationship with labor unions that has led to smooth operations dating back decades to the era of co-founder Herb Kelleher. But the stress of recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic is fracturing those relationships between not only the carrier and pilots but also unions representing flight attendants and other workers.

Advertisement

The latest debacle was a stretch of more than 2,000 cancellations over the four-day Columbus Day weekend, more than a quarter of all of Southwest’s flights. While customers were bemoaning long delays, uncertainty and searches for hotel rooms, employees were left to assuage the situation while trying to figure out for themselves where they would sleep and where they would work the next day.

For Murray and the pilots union, the chaotic weekend was a continuation of summerlong problems plaguing the airline as it ramps back up to meet customer demand and recoup the billions of dollars it lost since the pandemic began.

“All we ever hear is that they are waiting on the operation to stabilize,” Murray said.

Advertisement

Even without the specter of vaccine mandates that are upsetting many airline industry workers, unions have been falling out of love with Southwest for more than a year. The pilots union sued Southwest in federal court in August over conditions this summer that included a lack of hotel rooms, transportation, food and poor scheduling practices.

The union referred to Southwest’s “illegal tactics” as a form of “asymmetrical warfare in negotiations.”

It amended the lawsuit last week to ask for an injunction against Southwest for mandating vaccines to comply with White House rules for federal contractors. The union wants the company to negotiate the terms of a mandate.

Southwest has repeatedly apologized to workers for conditions this summer, but union leaders say nothing has changed to prevent the disruptions. The company said it would reduce flights in the fall but ran its biggest schedule of the pandemic era on Oct. 10 with 3,614 scheduled flights. It would end up canceling more than 1,000 of those after bad weather on Oct. 8 in Florida created a cascading failure that disrupted flights for at least four days.

Flight attendants complained this summer that the company kept renewing an emergency sick leave policy that required doctor notes for every absence due to tight staffing.

Southwest and its pilots union have been in negotiations for a new contract since September 2020, clouding everything that happens between the two sides for almost a year. It’s also negotiating with several other unions, including flight attendants.

Robert Mann, an airline consultant with R.W. Mann and Co. who has worked with several airline unions, said the pandemic has driven a wedge between the two sides greater than the usual contract bargaining differences.

Advertisement

“You have people getting worn out,” Mann said. “When you are scheduled to fly a four-day trip and it’s extended to a five- or six-day trip and then you commute home and you have to pack a bag for another four-day trip.”

That’s because Southwest usually uses fewer reserve pilots than other major airlines, Mann said. In good times, that makes Southwest run more efficiently and lowers costs. When rough weather or a busy weekend comes, pilots pick up extra flights.

But the airline has been stretched thin all summer, Mann said. Pilots and flight attendants can only handle so much extra work.

“The problem isn’t exclusive to Southwest, but the impact at Southwest is probably greater because of the limited reserve ratios,” Mann said.

Advertisement

Southwest has also changed some of its flying models during the pandemic. It’s added more than 20 locations.

Incoming CEO Bob Jordan told The Dallas Morning News that the company is adding 5,000 employees this year and 8,000 next year to getting staffing back up to where it should be.

The airline said the extra destinations have meant fewer daily flights into every location, making it harder to recover when there are widespread problems such as last weekend.

Southwest Airlines, while only flying about 80% as many flights as it did a year ago, is also flying with about 8% fewer pilots after about 800 left during the pandemic with voluntary retirement packages.

Advertisement

But Southwest has been taking criticism for more than a year after telling unionized employees they would need to take 10% pay cuts to save the company costs in the face of dramatically reduced flying during the worst of the pandemic. The alternative was widespread furloughs, although it didn’t come to that because Congress approved more than $50 billion in payroll support aid for the airline industry over the next eight months.

Meanwhile, across town American Airlines employees rallied Friday against vaccine mandates in front of the airline’s headquarters in Fort Worth. Hundreds said they were willing to lose their jobs if they were forced to be vaccinated to keep working.

But American Airlines has historically had a rocky relationship with its unions. When ordering American Airlines back to the bargaining table with pilots, federal judge Joe Kendall once told the company, “If you looked up bad labor relations in the dictionary, it would have an American Airlines logo by it.”

Southwest, on the other hand, has historically spent less time in long, tense negotiations with unions than some competitors. One of Southwest’s worst confrontations was a protracted, six-year negotiation with mechanics that was settled in 2019. Just a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the equation for all airlines and unions as some analysts questioned whether the industry would survive.

Advertisement

Mann said Southwest still has a relatively good relationship with its labor unions, although it has been strained recently.

Southwest, operating in the complex and highly regulated airline industry, may just be the latest to suffer a supply chain failure in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Arthur Wheaton, a faculty member at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who studies labor issues.

“COVID has stressed everybody out in a bunch of areas,” Wheaton said. “There are logistics and supply chain issues across the entire system including paper towels, gasoline and computer chips.”

Now employees are suddenly in demand after a year of sacrificing their personal health to help keep their companies alive. Many were laid off and furloughed during the pandemic, making them question their loyalty after decades of employers having the upper hand, Wheaton said.

Advertisement

“For airline workers, it’s not just money and benefits,” he said. “They are being attacked and assaulted on the job.”