My wife saw my Dec schedule and got sad and told me, “I won’t get a present this year”. Told her to get a job, work on Xmas and she can get some free socks. She laughed.

I ask on the free food holidays what deals we get. If they don’t offer free food, I’ll order what I want there or go out. Either way I expense it and it gets paid by the CP. Not worth getting panties in a knot over.

 

What'll they do next? Take away the signed birthday cards?! That would be an outrage! The culture, the culture... blah blah blah...

All that stuff is meaningless and anyone who falls for it is a simpleton. It's about the contract, the pay, the days off.... Not a stupid pair of Chinese socks.

 

It is truly staggering how much real money the "psychic wage", AKA, "culture" has cost this pilot group over the decades.

 

I agree the culture thing is a bit overdone. Nobody at the company cares about you because you are just a number. GK couldn’t care less if you fly for SWA.

 

22 years here so we are contemporaries. Worked Christmas my first year. None after that. If you worked Christmas more than once or twice that was your choice. And you are griping about not getting a Christmas ornament or socks. Weird.

 

Lol. 😂 (filler)

 

Gifts to flight attendants?? Here, let me help you:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-d...d-ryan-russell

I bet you these gents would be far more appreciative of your gift. And until the flight attendants denounce this kind of BS en masse and chip in to fight this nonsense as well as throw LM out of office, my interactions with them are outlined in the manual.

 

For real. I had to work Christmas for a few years in a row and the cutting board and passport wallet were nice. When they started with the socks and then did a victory lap the next year, I knew they stopped trying. I don't work Christmas or the days leading up to it anymore because there is just too much scheduling chicanery that would ruin any plans I had. No matter how overmanned we are, Christmas time is still a wild scramble to find bodies. Let that be a lesson to the managers in training who said they decided to overman to "prevent JAs". Yeah, um ok.

Those two pilots are being shanghaied by the legal system and two flight attendants looking for a nice payday. I hope this comes out in the pilots favor and blows up in the FAs faces. Ridiculous.

 

ROFF, point well-taken. This is because 1) culture is not about coming to work and making friends, 2) silly gifts are just that -- silly and worthless, and 3) this isn't elementary school -- it's a corporation.

That said, real culture must start from the top-down. Real culture is not where the employees buy each other coffee and goof around on Facebook... real culture is where it starts from the CEO and trickles down. And, it includes real care, not from the employees, but from the corporation: quality hotels, a sizable Christmas bonus, a gift of positive-space round-trip airfare, vouchers to take your family out if you worked a holiday, and a whole lot more. The bottom line is that the CEO must set the precedent, and it needs to trickle down.

If that were provided, would you feel differently that culture is, in fact, important to you? Real question.

 

Bingo. Any interactions outside ‘it’s too hot and cold back here’ or ‘we need a new seatbelt for 24E...a kid puked on it’ are flashing red lights on top of a landmine.

We need separate hotels and industry standard hotel language in our contract. Interacting with the FAs is now just a liability until they prove otherwise, and even then it’s only polite, professional, and to the point. As long as their Union President is still their Union President, they’re on their own.

Can ya feel the luv?