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The Nevers

The Nevers

June 15, 2023

“Much as you try to bury it, the truth is out there. Greater than your lies, the truth wants to be known. You will know it.” – Fox Mulder

This year, for the first time, SWAPA began representing the views of our Pilots to potential job applicants at events such as the Women in Aviation (WIA) Conference. As reported by MDW FO and Strike Committee member Kelly Hanley in the March RP, “The overall mission of attending was simple: Provide an honest line Pilot’s experience on pay, benefits, and day-to-day flying at Southwest, including the details of our current contract, our goals in negotiations, and how SWAPA is advocating for our Pilots on a daily basis.” Yet the Company had a different view of SWAPA’s attendance. According to MDW rep Laurin Toriello in her March domicile column, “There arose a wholly inaccurate narrative that SWAPA was there to undermine the Company’s efforts to recruit attendees.”

That was just four months ago. In the interim, 147 Pilots have left SWA in 2023 alone for better career opportunities (as of this publication date). As reported in the April RP article,“The Departed,” their reasons for leaving are varied, but many of the common pain points have been highlighted to the Company and have fallen on the head of an ostrich whose head is buried deep in the sand. As the pace of departures continued to accelerate, “The Levee” described Pilots still on the seniority list but who had a firm class date, conditional job offer (CJO), scheduled interview, or who were updating their logbooks and actively seeking another employer.

In this article, I’d like to discuss another category of SWA Pilot, one that is harder to quantify but definitely exists: Those who will never step foot in the LEAD building as a SWA new hire Pilot. Let's refer to them as "the Nevers," if you will.

The exact number of “Nevers” is unknown, but they are out there. They are the Pilots we speak to at job fairs who openly admit that they aren’t interested in applying to SWA. They’re the Pilots who are offered a class date but reject the opportunity outright or accept the SWA offer but never bother to show up for class, or worse yet, simply ghost us all together. This is in stark contrast to when I applied 17 years ago, and an open house at SWA headquarters would draw a thousand Pilots just hoping to find an angle to score an interview, let alone a job offer. This is the sad reality of where we find ourselves today. To quote former Continental Airlines CEO Gordon Bethune in From Worst to First, Southwest has “made the pizza so cheap, nobody wants to eat it.” 

And it’s not just the paucity of our decades-old contract language, lagging pay, and benefits that trail our peers causing the nonexistent excitement from new recruits. The truth of how Southwest treats both its internal and external customers is finally starting to penetrate the veneer of Nuts! that Southwest has been able to maintain since Herb passed the reigns to Gary. SWAPA has unapologetically shone a glaring light on this, and the response from those on the outside looking in is stark. Consider a reply to “The Departed” on social media:

“Wow. As (a) Pilot building toward (an FAR part)121 (airline), SWA was always my top pick. The money and upgrade time were concerns, but SWA stayed my dream spot. After reading this, I don’t think I’m even going to apply to SWA at all now. Things could change between now and then, but as a potential prospective employee this is an eye-opening post. I hope things turn around for everyone there, but this post did as much damage to future prospective employees as it sounds the Company has done.”

And another one spoken by a Pilot at a recent job fair: “Southwest used to be the dream. Now, I have multiple friends who have training dates scheduled, but they are waiting on their Delta class. It’s not like it was when I started flying. I was working toward my hours to get me to SWA. And now I’m shopping around. Southwest has become just another big airline. Sure, the people are nice, but nice people won’t pay my bills or make sure I can be home for my kid's birthday.” 

It’s never been our intention to dissuade Pilots from coming to Southwest. We simply highlight the inequalities between SWA and the more attractive booths at the job fairs — and to be frank it doesn’t take much. The reality of our situation is such that the truth hurts when it’s true. 

The truth hurts because we don’t need to encourage potential SWA Pilots to look elsewhere. The Company has done quite enough of that on their own. From the WIA conference to the National Gay Pilots Association Conference to TPNx and most recently the Professional Asian Pilots Association Expo hosted by Southwest in Las Vegas, the Company’s presentations are sparsely attended while our competitors, most notably Delta, United, and American, speak to standing room-only crowds. And the highlight of each day at TPNx? That was when American marched a dozen sharply dressed Pilots in front of an enthusiastic crowd and announced the newest members of their crew, handing out CJOs to applicants whom they had interviewed earlier in the day at their booth. And speaking of the “Nevers," one attendee pulled me aside as we were exiting the escalator on day two at TPNx and introduced himself as having a CJO from Southwest. He went on to tell me that he was attending the conference specifically to speak to SWAPA but more importantly — because he wanted to score a CJO from American. Dressed in a well-tailored navy suit, starched shirt, and smartly knotted tie, he looked the part of an American Pilot, and as we ended our conversation an hour later, I wished him luck and thought to myself, he’ll end up on that stage by the end of the day. 

Seventeen years ago, American had Pilots on furlough and was consistently teetering on the brink of bankruptcy with a debt-to-equity ratio so high that it looked as if the end was nigh. Scoring a Southwest interview alone was like winning the lottery, and a SWA job offer? Almost inconceivable. Like winning the lottery twice in the same day. My, how things have changed. 

Now there is an entire generation of young aviators who look upon Southwest as the last resort on their list of desired locations to hang their hat for a career. And despite our most recent history of job-fair impartiality, where both sides of the proverbial coin are illustrated for an inquiring Pilot, the Company’s entrenched positions and lack of sincere bargaining for C2020 for the last thousand-plus days has led to this point.

At the direction of SWAPA President Casey Murray, the message will change, and questions will be answered more brutally and often with another question:

Why would you want to come to an airline that just claimed they have never furloughed but conveniently failed to mention that 1,221 of our junior Pilots were threatened with it just two years ago and held hostage in a half-baked attempt to reduce our pay by 10% and to insert force majeure language into our contract? Right before Christmas, no less!

Why would you want to come to an airline that doesn’t provide the same long and short-term disability benefits as our competitors and will kick you to the curb if you run out of sick time while out on a medical disability? 

For our female aviators, why would you want to work for a Company that shows its contempt for female Pilots with decades-old maternity leave language in its contract?

Why would you want to work for an airline that publicly espouses adherence to the Golden Rule as a reason to come to Southwest on their sparsely viewed briefing slide, and yet in actuality adheres to a different code of conduct in disparate Pilot discipline and “Labor Relations.” 

Why would you want to come to an airline where you can hump it all year long on the line as a member of the most productive Pilots in the world, only to have the Company’s history of deficient investment in its archaic IT rear its ugly head at the worst possible time of the year, leading to the loss of 50% of your hard-earned profit sharing? Everyone except the C-suite, that is, because they essentially told us to eat cake while enriching themselves with millions in stock grants.

Why would you want to work for a Company whose CEO couldn’t be bothered to show up on the national stage in front of Congress to answer the hard questions about the aforementioned meltdown? The airline he rode first class from BWI-DFW the day before the Congressional testimony is just over there (pointing to the American booth, of course), and they are interviewing candidates for CJOs today. 

The answer is you would never want to work for a company like that. Just as Mulder said, the truth is out there, and greater than the Company’s lies, the truth wants to be known. Our more senior Pilots see it. Our new hires see it. And now the Nevers are seeing it — even before stepping foot on property. 

And guess who was up on the stage with an American CJO at the end of the day?