Right there with you, brother, believe me.
There is this pervasive attitude at SWA that all employee groups are somehow on equal footing when it comes to benefits and retirement compensation. It fits well with the old egalitarian model where we were a startup airline led by a maverick CEO that everyone loved and admired. There was no tribalism, no ground ops vs flight ops vs HQ, they were all a team getting the flights pushed off the gate and customers to their destinations.
Now, for some reason, this has led to every employee group feeling entitled to each other's contract benefits and genuine resent from other employee groups (mostly non front line employees) that the pilots are ALREADY getting paid so much and now they have the audacity to ask for more. The company takes advantage of this by blatantly promoting tribalism and saying that they can't give us something because then they have to give it to other employee groups.
Our union leadership has done an excellent job of putting an end to this among our own membership (hard to believe they had to do that, but there are a good number of pilots who STILL think we don't deserve what our competitors get).
The industry standard is a 16 percent B fund PLUS profit sharing. Period. To accept less is to devalue our contribution to this company's success. I would never ask our CEO to accept less than what he is worth, why is he asking me to?
My standard response to any other employee who makes remarks about pilot pay and benefits is that we are hiring pilots right now and the application window is open.