By Conor Shine
08/01/2016
Leaders of Southwest Airlines’ pilots and mechanics unions have called for the ouster of the Dallas-based company’s CEO, Gary Kelly, and chief operating officer Mike Van de Ven in a vote of no confidence, the unions said Monday.
“As tenured employees and frontline leaders of this company, we can no longer sit idly by and watch poor decision after poor decision deeply affect our customers and Southwest Airlines,” Capt. Jon Weaks, president of Southwest Airlines Pilots’ Association, said in a written statement. “We believe that a change is needed for the best interests of Southwest Airlines and the loyal customers we serve.”
Weaks pointed to what he called “years of operational deficiencies, unprecedented labor strife and continued culture erosion” at Southwest as reasons for the no-confidence vote.
Weaks and Louie Key, national director of Southwest's mechanics union, also criticized the company for the July 20 technical outage that led to the cancellation of 2,300 flights and caused widespread disruption for flight crews and employees over several days.
Key, national director of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, called the technology failure "the last straw."
"The current leadership has dragged out our contract negotiations for nearly four years, eroded the company culture that employees hold dear, and continued to put Band-Aids on its operational systems rather than invest in company upgrades," Key said in a statement.
Southwest downplayed the no-confidence vote as a negotiating tactic and said the company is regularly recognized for its financial, operational and customer service performance.
"This latest move by the new leaders of the Southwest Airlines Pilots' Association is designed to pressure the company to meet its demands," Southwest's vice president of labor relations Randy Babbitt said in a statement. "Their maneuvering is not about our leaders. It's not about 'IT infrastructure.' This is about the union's approach to contract discussions and its attempt to gain leverage in negotiations."
Kelly, a 30-year Southwest employee, has served as CEO since 2004 and added the role of chairman and president in 2008.
The no-confidence vote comes at a time of record profitability for Southwest — the company earned $820 million in the second quarter of 2016 — which has coincided with prolonged and increasingly contentious labor negotiations with several of its largest unions.
Pilots, mechanics and flight attendants unions, which collectively represent about 23,000 Southwest employees, have each been negotiating new contract terms for nearly four years, with few recent signs of progress.
In addition to pay increases and changes to retirement benefits, the unions and Southwest have been at a stalemate over contract language that affects job duties and protections.
Under federal law, unionized airline employees are prohibited from going on strike in all but the most extreme circumstances and only after an exhaustive process of negotiation and mediation.
Without the option of a strike, Southwest's unions are limited to things like pickets -- of which they've had at least four this year. The pilots union has also sued Southwest over new Boeing 737-Max planes scheduled to enter the fleet next year, which pilots say they won't fly without a new deal.
The no-confidence vote -- which a pilots union spokesman said is the first in the organization's history -- is the latest escalation in the ongoing labor battle
In his statement, Weaks employed an oft-used line of attack on Southwest, accusing the company’s executives of putting financial performance and shareholder concerns ahead of its employees and customers. Union leaders have called the perceived shift in priorities an inversion of Southwest’s long-standing customer- and employee-friendly corporate culture.
Weaks also called out Southwest for failing to invest in modernizing “critically outdated” technology and flight operation systems.
“These decisions have directly led to the operational failure at Midway Airport in January 2014, chaotic crew scheduling during the summers and holidays of 2014 to 2016, and our most recent ‘meltdown’ related to technological infrastructure this past month,” he said.
On Friday, CEO Kelly said the company’s preliminary review indicated that the aging technology systems did not contribute to the outage.
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