Southwest Airlines Co. (NYSE:LUV) got a taste of what it is like to be an airline on Wednesday, as its pilots voted down a collective bargaining agreement that would have provided them a raise in the middle of a severe slump in the industry.
The vote is a rare bit of turbulence for Southwest, which has long enjoyed a reputation as a maverick able to soar above the turmoil that has plagued the industry in recent years. Capt. Carl Kuwitzky, president of the union,
said in a statement that the contract "despite some financial gains, contained too many other negative aspects to ratify it."
Kuwitzky didn't say what those negative aspects were, but they might have related to the airline's plans to establish codeshares to expand service into Mexico and Canada. Pilots were against the codeshares, preferring Southwest fly new routes with its own metal.
Longtime industry reporter Holly Hegeman, on her blog
PlaneBuzz, had an alternate theory for the rejection, saying the vote was a protest by pilots against what they see as a lack of leadership both at the airline and the union. "To put it bluntly," she wrote, "Why should the pilots at the airline vote for a contract that was going to put even more financial pressure on the airline that has seen its operating margins erode, its costs continue to rise, and its revenues continues to slump?"
Whatever the reasoning, the vote appears to be another sign of Southwest's gradual maturation away from the startup culture Herb Kelleher famously nurtured for decades into a more mature, complicated operator. Southwest in recent years has been moving aggressively away from its roots, embracing codeshares and chasing growth by abandoning its policy to favor secondary runways over congested, in-town airports.
The airline by year's end will fly into Boston instead of just Manchester, Vt., and Providence, R.I., and into LaGuardia instead of Islip, N.Y. Boston and New York would have seemed very un-Southwest-like just a few years ago. Then again, so would have labor strife. -
Lou Whiteman
Lou Whiteman is a senior writer covering the automotive, transportation and industrial sectors. Follow him on Twitter @louwhiteman
Join Corporate Dealmaker's LinkedIn forum
Juergen Lasowski
And the winners are...
I sure hope they don't just fly into Manchester, Vt., since there's no airport there...