Patience’s End

The Southwest Airlines Pilot Association (SWAPA)—the Dallas-based non-profit employee organization by which some ten-thousand Southwest Airlines pilots are represented—has filed a request with the U.S. National Mediation Board (NMB) seeking official and expedient release from mediation.

SWAPA has been mired in contract negotiations with Southwest Airlines’ management for upwards of three years. In September 2022, mutually compelled by a prolonged absence of progress, the two parties entered federal mediation.

SWAPA negotiators have since grown frustrated with the obduracy of Southwest Airlines’ management and mediators’ woeful inability to occasion dialogue.

SWAPA President Casey Murray stated: “If released from mediation, our pilot group will continue down the path afforded to us through the Railway Labor Act (RLA). It is an unfortunate situation that we find ourselves in today, however, our pilots have waited long enough for a contract.”

Mr. Murray added: “We can no longer sit by as our fellow aviators are rewarded with industry leading contracts and watch as we bleed qualified new hires to our competitors. We love our airline, and we are willing to do what it takes to get Southwest back to the airline it once was.”

In light of its request to terminate mediation, SWAPA hopes Southwest’s management will attend the bargaining table with increased temperance and renewed desire to expedite the drafting and ratification of an equitable, enduring, and long-overdue contract that acknowledges the merits of what SWAPA calls “the most productive 737 pilots in the industry.”

Southwest Airlines, however, disparaged SWAPA’s request for release from mediation.

Southwest vice-president of labor relations Adam Carlisle declared: ”We strongly disagree that we’re at a point which justifies either party asking to be released from mediation. We’ve continued meeting regularly with SWAPA and, in fact, made an industry-leading compensation proposal and scheduling adjustments to address workplace quality-of-life issues for our pilots.”

Carlisle concluded: “We feel confident that mediation will continue, driving us even closer to a final agreement that will benefit both our pilots and Southwest Airlines.”

Notwithstanding Mr. Carlisle’s assertions of Southwest’s munificence, some 9,800 of the air-carrier’s approximately ten-thousand pilots, in May 2023, voted in favor of authorizing a strike.

The convoluted regulatory constructs within which Part 121 pilot contracts are hammered-out spell out with pedantic specificity that the authorization of a strike is the first in a long and complex succession of ritualized supplications that must be made prior to an actual work stoppage.

By making such an authorization in the weeks immediately preceding the frantic and profitable summer travel season, Southwest’s pilots have exerted immense pressure on the airline’s management to assume a more cooperative tenor at the negotiation table.

The Railway Labor Act of 1926, to which the airline industry is beholden, prohibits pilots and other workers deemed essential to national transportation infrastructure from walking off their jobs until federal mediators confirm the two opposing sides of a labor dispute have arrived at an impasse beyond foreseeable resolution.

The strike authorization vote turned in by Southwest pilots doesn’t guarantee a labor stoppage; rather, it demonstrates the aviators’ collective resolve to strike at SWAPA’s directive to do so. The threat of a strike—and the compounding tragedies of lost revenue, public acrimony, and customer desertion precipitated thereby—is intended to succeed where federal mediators allegedly failed.

FMI: www.swapa.org