Originally Posted by
Ninethstage
Oh I was talking with another SWA buddy and getting their perspective on things. Their take was many pilots are ****ed at the company over the 1221 but don’t hold the pilot group to any kind of accountability for giving a middle finger to any kind of concession in the hopes of avoiding WARNs. He said loss of culture is as much a “pilot group thing” as it is a company thing - ie. if we perpetuate the ME at all costs, screw everyone else mentality then we’ll get what we get.
Culture is top down. This bugs me every time I hear somebody say it. Yes we as pilots (or any work group) can help UPHOLD the culture, but the culture is created by management.
Everybody talks about how American/etc have a worse culture. Is that the employees fault? Do they just only hire jerks? Of course not. I know many good people there. And even if they DID just hire all the butthead pilots, that would STILL be a management decision, and therefore management setting the culture.
The company came to us and said 10% or we're furloughing. That the pilots decided not to take concessions (while we were already being asked to step up to the plate to help out, and had already taken a big pay cut), which was not a giant middle finger to management so that we could "me me me". It was a calling of management's bluff when we had 5 years of cash in the bank where a 10% concession would have given the company an extra 22 days of extra cash flow.
We even agreed to negotiate and offer them cost savings in other ways, but ways that would be paid back during the good times. These were not only turned down by management, but each subsequent offer (demand) from the company got worse and demanded more. All while Gary took an initial 10% cut on his base salary (which works out to a 1% cut of total compensation) followed by a benevolent 100% base pay cut (which worked out to 10% of total compensation, which ended up not happening because he got a record bonus in 2020.
The mindset was not "screw you I got mine". It was "we've already given up disproportionate pay due to the max (everybody got the max bonus, even though it was only pilots and flight attendants who sacrificed pay during it), we're not going to give you money just to look good to wall street/government, when you have 5 years of cash in your war chest, with the trend of cash burn going in the right direction."
Let's also not forget that during that time, the company refused to engage swapa in cost cutting measures like leave and early separation. ETO, ExTO, and VSP were all implemented extra-contractualy, without meaningful input or endorsement from swapa.
So no. 1221(1220) was not due to the pilots' selfishness.