Originally Posted by
cadetdrivr
Nope. It's all good "talk" until the corporation is threatened. Then all bets are off. This applies to any company, no matter how nice they were in the past.
Last downturn SWA was fortunate enough to have significant fuel hedges in place which saved the day when fuel spiked and decimated the rest of the industry. Note that SWA had not unilaterally predicted a fuel spike, they were just trying to flatten their expenses for predictable earnings forecasting.
While its better to be lucky than good, had those fuel hedges not been in place the carnage would have been significant and unlike virtually anything SWA had faced in the past.
As I recall a lot of those actual hedges were purchased with good ole SWA cash from Delta as they were burning the furniture to heat the house for a period of time until a trip to BK became evident.
Bottom line SWA never had pensions to deal with and it took till the mid 2000”s for the legacies to realize that to compete on costs they needed to get rid of theirs as well. The only way to do that is in BK court.
I was just visiting a state where there are now thousands with state pensions guaranteed for life in the mid 100k”s. Many make more in pension than they earned. Ironically the paper was stating that there is nothing to be done about this as the state cannot go BK so they must raise taxes/starve current services and pay up.