No love today from SWA

SoonerAviator said:
Let me know when you have copies of the meeting transcripts and various contract versions. Until then, it's just baseless to argue about placing blame on anyone. If it were just about wages, I'm sure they could have come to an agreement by now. I'd imagine there's quite a lot more to the contract negotiations which has been the subject of impasse.
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The biggest sticking point is that SWA is trying to send a lot of their heavy maintenance overseas.
 
Sluggo63 said:
The biggest sticking point is that SWA is trying to send a lot of their heavy maintenance overseas.
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I understand why the mechanics would be concerned about it, but if I were the management/owner of a company, I sure wouldn't want my workforce trying to dictate what options I had available to me.
 
Sluggo63 said:
The biggest sticking point is that SWA is trying to send a lot of their heavy maintenance overseas.
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And the union hasn't offered an attractive alternative? That's not surprising. The fact that you blame SWA for the union's failure is though.
 
Lindberg said:
And the union hasn't offered an attractive alternative? That's not surprising. The fact that you blame SWA for the union's failure is though.
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How do you know they haven’t? You’ve made it clear on this board that you’re anti-labor, so your assumption that this is all the union’s fault isn’t surprising.

It’s a negotiation - both sides are going to try to get as much as they can out of the other. I don’t blame either of them.
 
kayoh190 said:
How do you know they haven’t? You’ve made it clear on this board that you’re anti-labor, so your assumption that this is all the union’s fault isn’t surprising.

It’s a negotiation - both sides are going to try to get as much as they can out of the other. I don’t blame either of them.
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Lol. I've made it clear that I'm anti-union. In fact I'm quite pro-labor and employees, which is not coincidental. And yes, I've been a union member. I've also negotiated and litigated with them. But it's a tautology. If the union had presented an attractive alternative, SWA would have taken it.

Now this part is just speculating, but based on experience, I would bet that any "compromise" the union offered required no loss of union jobs.
 
You seem to think there’s some objective ‘attractive offer’ - there’s not. It’s a negotiation - there’s what SWA wants, and what the union wants. They’ll end up somewhere between the two. If both parties end up a little ****ed with the final result, it was probably about as fair as it could be. :)
 
kayoh190 said:
You seem to think there’s some objective ‘attractive offer’ - there’s not. It’s a negotiation - there’s what SWA wants, and what the union wants. They’ll end up somewhere between the two. If both parties end up a little ****ed with the final result, it was probably about as fair as it could be. :)
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That's the old joke...

There's an airline union meeting and the chairman get up in front and tells all the pilots, "Great news! We just signed a new contract with the company. Every one will make $300,000 per year, and you only have to work on Wednesdays." Then a voice from the back of the room says "Every Wednesday?"
 
The mechanics received a significant profit sharing bonus in early 2018 and 2019. I'd say that's benefitting from "one of the most prosperous eras for airlines in recent memory" as Sluggo put it. Southwest said the bonus was equivalent to about five weeks of pay for each of Southwest’s 56,000 employees.

Does the union include this bonus when comparing member compensation to mechanics at other airlines? Do other airlines make similar payments?

All of the articles I could find about recent profit sharing bonuses at Delta and American only mentioned pilots. They were complaining about the amounts. :D
 
3393RP said:
The mechanics received a significant profit sharing bonus in early 2018 and 2019. I'd say that's benefitting from "one of the most prosperous eras for airlines in recent memory" as Sluggo put it. Southwest said the bonus was equivalent to about five weeks of pay for each of Southwest’s 56,000 employees.

Does the union include this bonus when comparing member compensation to mechanics at other airlines? Do other airlines make similar payments?

All of the articles I could find about recent profit sharing bonuses at Delta and American only mentioned pilots. They were complaining about the amounts. :D
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Delta paid its employees $1.3B in profit sharing in February. They say most employees will get about 14% of their annual salary in profit sharing.

https://news.delta.com/following-13...employees-will-be-paid-640000-volunteer-hours

The SWA number you quoted above is less than 10%. Still a nice perk, agreed. But, it doesn’t really matter if other airlines are paying profit sharing. If I was a SWA mechanic and looked around at other employee groups, I’d be thinking “these guys and gals got their profit sharing AND their raises. How much does SWA value my time and effort?”
 
Sluggo63 said:
Delta paid its employees $1.3B in profit sharing in February. They say most employees will get about 14% of their annual salary in profit sharing.

https://news.delta.com/following-13...employees-will-be-paid-640000-volunteer-hours

The SWA number you quoted above is less than 10%. Still a nice perk, agreed. But, it doesn’t really matter if other airlines are paying profit sharing. If I was a SWA mechanic and looked around at other employee groups, I’d be thinking “these guys and gals got their profit sharing AND their raises. How much does SWA value my time and effort?”
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Having lived in SWA's hometown for over 40 years and knowing people who've worked for the company in many areas, it isn't known for paying market scale. And yet it's never hurting for applicants for any job opening.
 
Lindberg said:
Having lived in SWA's hometown for over 40 years and knowing people who've worked for the company in many areas, it isn't known for paying market scale. And yet it's never hurting for applicants for any job opening.
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That's because the labor shortage in America is a manufactured LIE. We have a labor surplus in most industries, and in those we do not, we have an unwillingness on the part of private industry to pay for the skills gap retraining of our citizens (again under the auspices of said labor suprlus in the aggegrate population). This isn't rocket science.

P.S....and yes there is no pilot shortage. Go ask for a class date at a regional today. Dont' quit your day job, is the punch line, quite literally. We see what we want to see. I digress.
 
ATW said:
The simmering battle between Southwest Airlines and its mechanics saw a new group join the fight, as the airline’s pilots’ union blasted management for “tribalizing and scapegoating” technicians to cover for an “ineffective” operation.

“The last few weeks have highlighted how poorly upper management at Southwest Airlines is performing, how it truly views labor, how ineffective its communication and execution of our daily operation are, and how everyone at our airline should be concerned,” Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) president Jon Weaks said in a sharply worded and unusually detailed message made public late Feb. 25.

At issue are “state of operational emergency” (SOE) declarations that Southwest made at five maintenance stations—Houston Hobby, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Dallas Love Field—after its out-of-service aircraft count jumped in early February. The Dallas-based airline, in a Feb. 19 statement attributed to Southwest COO Mike Van de Ven, said its mechanics—embroiled in a bitter contract negotiation and fresh off the latest round of talks—initiated a planned work slowdown as a de facto protest. The emergency declarations raise the bar on acceptable sick-time requests, mandate overtime, and limit non-critical work, including union meetings. “We will be investigating this current disruption and exploring all possible remedies,” Van De Ven said.

The airline’s out-of-service count averaged 42 aircraft per day from Feb. 10-21 and peaked at more than 60, data shared with ATW show. The average for the year up to Feb. 10 was 14. The spike forced cancellation of more than 10% of the airline’s 4,000-flight daily schedule at its peak. Southwest began 2019 with 750 aircraft.

Mechanics, represented by the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA), deny the airline’s charges, saying specific issues added to their workloads. Weaks added details that support AMFA’s claims.

Southwest “failed to account for the weather-related maintenance actions that resulted from of several recent winter storms and an increase in dents and holes in cargo bins,” Weaks wrote. “[T]here was a part effectivity issue with 22 [737-8] aircraft concerning O-rings for the engine fuel filters that caused these aircraft to be out of service,” Weaks added. “And since the 737-8 is a newer aircraft, it is sometimes difficult to get the needed tooling or extra parts necessary to keep an aircraft in service.”

The airline provided AMFA with aggregated data supporting accusations of “unlawful” action by mechanics, Weaks’s message revealed.

According to Weaks, the airline told AMFA in a Feb. 22 letter that “data analysis confirms that naturally occurring maintenance or other events could not statistically produce these extremely high Unscheduled Aircraft Downtime (UAD) hours over the course of the past week.”

AMFA said that attendance rates and overtime work acceptance did not change in the days leading up to the SOEs. It asked Southwest for more detailed UAD data, and “evidence of any operational disruptions, including any flights canceled or delayed,” attributable to mechanics’ deliberate, unlawful actions.

The airline has produced no such data, Weaks said.

“What is glaringly missing from [the airline’s] accusation is the fact that the company has not stated that there has been any invalid, false, or fabricated safety write-ups,” he said.

Southwest has not commented publicly beyond Van de Ven’s statement.

AMFA last fall rejected a proposed contract, continuing a stalemate that is now six and half years long. When the two sides sat down in January, Southwest’s new proposal removed limits on contract maintenance that were in the earlier, rejected agreement. “The company’s current proposal would delete the entire section in our contract which restricts Southwest from any foreign outsourcing without the union’s consent,” AMFA told members in early February.

The contract maintenance issue remains a sticking point. AFMA has asked Southwest for data comparing “reliability rates” of third-party vendors to internal technicians, and SWAPA renewed that call in Weaks’s message.

“If management is touting outsourcing maintenance as a critical element of future success, they should release data showing the maintenance reliability rates for each vendor compared to the reliability rates of our mechanics,” Weaks said. “These reliability rates should include how much work was initially done incorrectly, and how much work had to be redone once the aircraft was put back into service. This data should be published for past work and for work in the future.”

The SWAPA message does not include a similar call for cost data—the primary driver in using third-party providers over internal maintenance staff.
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http://m.atwonline.com/mro/southwest-airlines-pilots-blast-management-over-maintenance-issues

(All emphasis in the above quote is mine, and not in the original article.)
 
hindsight2020 said:
P.S....and yes there is no pilot shortage. Go ask for a class date at a regional today. Dont' quit your day job, is the punch line, quite literally. We see what we want to see. I digress.
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Really? I think the opposite is true. Anecdotal evidence is showing that regionals are lowering their competitive mins and increasing pilot pay. I know several people who have thrown an application in at a regional and received an email/call that day or the next to conduct a phone interview with a face-to-face shortly after that.

Several major airlines are loosening the 1,000 TPIC mins and relaxing the requirements for the 4-year college degree requirements. I think, at least at my airline, that we are seeing a fight between the majors to get the top-qualified applicants. And from buddies in my old Reserve unit, it’s a buyer’s market with highly qualified pilots getting calls from multiple airlines.

Lastly, maybe the pilot shortage isn’t so extreme here in the US (although I still think it is), but aviation is a global market. I get spammed everyday with offers to go fly overseas in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. I think global aviation is hurting for qualified pilots (especially in East Asia).

I think any poster on this board with their commercial ticket and the minimum time can find themselves flying at a regional airline in 6 months.
 
What's the minimum times now?
 
Lindberg said:
If they aren't doing their jobs, SWA should fire them. Oh wait, it can't.
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Airlines can’t fire people? Sure they can. What they can’t do is fire them without cause. The union said that they showed no increase of sick use, holiday use, etc. before the “Operational Emergencies” were declared. The company wouldn’t/couldn’t provide detailed data to dispute that.

What it does sounds like is that the company failed to adequately plan for weather disruptions and the fact that the new aircraft type is going to require extra maintenance with less than adequate parts and tooling and are trying to blame it on the mechanics.

What the mechanics should be wary of is having the company run to a sympathetic judge and have an injunction filed against the mechanics to force them to work overtime and on their days off, much like was done to Delta and United pilots.
 
Thanks. Looks like I'm lacking ME time. Shoulda bought a 30 instead of a 24.
 
Sluggo63 said:
Airlines can’t fire people? Sure they can. What they can’t do is fire them without cause. The union said that they showed no increase of sick use, holiday use, etc. before the “Operational Emergencies” were declared. The company wouldn’t/couldn’t provide detailed data to dispute that.

What it does sounds like is that the company failed to adequately plan for weather disruptions and the fact that the new aircraft type is going to require extra maintenance with less than adequate parts and tooling and are trying to blame it on the mechanics.

What the mechanics should be wary of is having the company run to a sympathetic judge and have an injunction filed against the mechanics to force them to work overtime and on their days off, much like was done to Delta and United pilots.
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GMAB. First, Texas is an at-will state. No cause needed to fire a mechanic. But for unions and the RLA. So don't say SWA can fire people and also say the unions aren't what let them get away with crap that would otherwise get them fired. Second, SWA might have the best data analytics in the business. You really believe it failed to account for weather? Everybody knows what's happening here. Occam's razor.
 
Lindberg said:
GMAB. First, Texas is an at-will state. No cause needed to fire a mechanic. But for unions and the RLA. So don't say SWA can fire people and also say the unions aren't what let them get away with crap that would otherwise get them fired.
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Lindberg said:
In fact I'm quite pro-labor and employees...
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Sure you are... :rolleyes:

I’m out of the argument. You can have the last word on this. We’re not changing anyone’s minds, and we’re probably boring the crap of anyone else left who is actually still clicking on this post.

We’ll see what eventually happens when the mechanics contract is settled. Right now, I think SWA is being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

I’m out.
 
Sluggo63 said:
The biggest sticking point is that SWA is trying to send a lot of their heavy maintenance overseas.
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Outsider looking in here. I know a handful of people that work for, or are otherwise close to SWA. I've heard many different reasons for the friction between the mechanics and management (it's about bonuses, it's about stock options, it's about taking maintenance overseas, etc).

Is there any one resource somewhere on the web that summarizes the current issues at SWA?
 
fasteddie said:
Outsider looking in here. I know a handful of people that work for, or are otherwise close to SWA. I've heard many different reasons for the friction between the mechanics and management (it's about bonuses, it's about stock options, it's about taking maintenance overseas, etc).

Is there any one resource somewhere on the web that summarizes the current issues at SWA?
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https://medium.com/@AMFANational/de...-our-negotiations-with-southwest-38a03928cd73

Sauce:
http://www.amfanational.org/?zone=/unionactive/view_page.cfm&page=Southwest20Airlines
 
It's such a weird coincidence that SWA failed to account for weather disruptions for the first time in decades at the same time negotiations with the mechanics union broke down. But that's so much more likely than a work slowdown. :rolleyes:
 
Lindberg said:
It's such a weird coincidence that SWA failed to account for weather disruptions for the first time in decades at the same time negotiations with the mechanics union broke down. But that's so much more likely than a work slowdown. :rolleyes:
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And why would a new 737 MAX require "extra" maintenance needing a parts and tooling inventory?

How many of the planes reported as out of service are 737 MAX aircraft?
 
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