There's an unsubstantiated rumor that 120 Southwest ramp agents walked off the job at Denver International Airport after the VP of operations out of Dallas sent a demanding (and possibly unreasonable) memo to the Denver staff banning sick time without a doctors note and requiring mandatory overtime.
> after the VP of operations out of Dallas sent a demanding (and possibly unreasonable) memo to the Denver staff banning sick time without a doctors note and requiring mandatory overtime
IANAL but that’s not just unreasonable, it’s downright illegal according to Colorado labor laws. Southwest can only ask their employees for a doctor’s note after four consecutive days of absence and that’s according to a post-COVID law.
I’m not sure about the mandatory overtime but that’s probably governed by a union contract (4/5ths of SW is unionized). Evidence shows that this ~moron~ VP didn’t know the specifics of the former so he probably fucked up the latter too.
I’m guessing Denver employees aren’t the only ones to walk out. Union solidarity, baby!
> it’s downright illegal according to Colorado labor laws.
Interesting, that's the first time I hear of a US law being better for employee protection than here in Germany. Do they have limited sick days? That could explain it, as they are obviously unlimited here, but doctor's notes are commonly required after 0-1 days.
It's not a US law, it's a state law. And there are plenty of laws throughout the union that are "better" (more favorable to the employee) than in various places in the EU. California, for instance, has pretty strict employee/tenant protections; along with Oregon, New York, etc. There are also others that are substantially worse (Mississippi, Alabama, etc).
You can't compare US Federal law to German Federal law (in these cases), as the Federal government is significantly and substantively hands off to labor concerns (beyond the bare minimum). You would have to compare specific state statutes to Bundesrat+Bundesland statutes.
I meant "the first time I hear" quite literally, I know there are state laws and those can be quite different, I just had never heard of a specific law regarding employee protection that actually was better for employees
There was no doubt to the literality of your statement. I was simply highlighting your misplaced assumptions and how they can be addressed/corrected in the future.
No, again, I simply hadn't heard of an example. I knew there was the chance, after all some states have legal abortion which Germany still does not (it's almost defacto legal, but only almost) to take another example.
> I just had never heard of a specific law regarding employee protection that actually was better for employees; ergo I assumed there wasn't, leading to my surprise at hearing otherwise.
Here is an expanded version of your quote that highlights the assumption.
In my opinion (I am not attempting to state facts), the semantics of what is a “US law” and what is an “EU law” differ, because the US is a nation and the EU is not.
Therefore it’s my opinion that in order for something to be a “US law”, it’s enough that it’s a law anywhere in the US. I think laws differing across the US is already implied which is why care is taken to label something a “federal” law or crime when it does not.
In the EU however, any law that semantically fits into what could be called an “EU law” is a top-down mandate due to the fact that the EU is not a nation but a group of nations, so calling for example a law that exclusively exists in Poland an “EU law” becomes nonsensical when it didn’t even originate from the EU organization. The US is (at least not primarily) just an “organization of states” regardless what one might want to believe from reading the constitution. It’s very much a monolithic nation state in a way that the EU is not and possibly never will be.
I think what makes your definition confusing or misleading is the concept of dual sovereignty.
Under the concept of dual sovereignty in a federal system (such as the United States, Russia, Canada, or India), conduct can be legal or illegal under each of the sovereigns independently. At least post-Lochner era there are many laws that are in this scope.
An example that might test your definition would be recreational use of marijuana which is legal in some states but illegal federally. It would be at best misleading to say that "US law permits the recreational use of marijuana" even though it meets your definition.
I wasn't comparing US law to EU law. I said take a random labor law and state. Given that law, there are various EU nations the the US' would "surpass" (have more citizen/personal protections) and there are some it would "lose" against (more protections for corporations/big brother).
Take a liberal state like California or New York and the "surpass" count would be much higher (as in this case, this specific example "surpassing" Germany), especially in regards to labor and tenant protections. Take a state like Mississippi and there are very few EU nations it would "surpass". The counter being to the OP's assumption that the EU, in general, is "more liberal than the US"; ergo it's crazy that there's a state that's actually more protective.
Labor laws in Texas have no effect on the 12% of the population that lives in California. So it's disingenuous to compare these laws, something the Federal government specifically doesn't have much say over (due to the enumerated powers clause of the US' limited Federation), to a random nation. The only proper methodology is to compare the scope of where those laws are set. In this specific example, those contexts are: the State level, in the US; a mixture of Bundesrat and Bundesland legislation in Germany.
I never even mentioned the EU assembly or EU laws. It would seem you're creating a straw man to "win" an internet argument or reinforce your own worldview.
I know I'm a spoiled engineer but if a company ever required a doctor's note I'd just come to work sick, walk into my boss's office and cough as hard as I could directly in their face.
If you don't trust me don't hire me. I could cause all kinds of issues for your company. I won't because I'm trustworthy. If you treat me as untrustworthy by not trusting that I'm sick when I say I'm stick then you don't trust me. If you don't trust me I'm not working for you.
It's extremely common in Germany, it's a form letter, and you get two versions, one for yourself with details, one for your employer which lacks details, especially the reason.
If they're unionized, why don't they all walk out now, in solidarity after a memo like that? I mean, it's the perfect time--You can practically see management's desperation leaping out of the screen. WTF is with that? Speak a magical incantation and suddenly labor rules don't matter? "I declare Double Secret Operation Emergency! Due to the emergency that we caused and we magically invoked, here's how we're going to beat you..."
I wouldn’t doubt this, although a friend stuck at Denver yesterday told me he ran into a Southwest employee who couldn’t figure out where he was supposed to be for hours. WSJ mentioned it could be due to their call-in scheduling system being totally overwhelmed.
We've heard a lot of stories about scheduling systems getting overwhelmed at airlines in the past few years. I wonder if any airlines are making a push to modernize them. Or is the business so low margin that they can't afford it?
I think the shareholders' perspective has been vastly overprioritized in recent decades, and it needs to take a back seat to the company's long-term health perspective, customers' perspective, the workers' perspective, and the overall health of the society's perspective.
Currently at another airport waiting to fly into DFW, and this is the current word among the airport crew as well: that Southwest is uniquely impacted right now because a bunch of the Southwest staff at Dallas just quit.
Oh that sucks. How is the weather there, is the distance such that you can rent a car or have some other means of transportation? Not a good time of the year to be stuck.
I don’t know about majority. Looking at pilot forums their scheduling system seems to be in complete disarray. Hours long wait times to get through on the phone, no awareness of where crews are even located.
The emergency procedures were likely put in place due to crew resourcing issues that were fallout from the storms. These procedures require more stringent review of sick requests to ensure all hands are on deck and are probably allowed by negotiated union contracts.
Oof. At the very least, any employer requiring a doctor’s note should pay for it. Getting in to see a doctor on short notice can be difficult and expensive.
I have a friend who's worked a series of crappy jobs that don't have health insurance and asks for doctor's notes when he's sick. So he provides doctor's notes by just printing them out himself.
That memo appears to be issued as a result of all the flight problems. And it says it's a temporary emergency policy due to the current trouble they are having.
Here's what I think happened.
Storm happens, Southwest demands all hands on deck with stipulations outlined in that memo, staff gets upset and walk off making the situation worse. The only evidence I have is that Southwest seems to be uniquely impacted by the storm
> If you've been left in the lurch and your efforts to reach a customer service agent are going nowhere, the founder of Scott's Cheap Flights suggests trying an international number.
> "The main hotline for US airlines will be clogged with other passengers getting rebooked. To get through to an agent quickly, call any one of the airline's dozens of international offices" Scott Keyes said.
> "Agents can handle your reservation just like US-based ones can, but there's virtually no wait to get through."
this is good advice, let me extrapolate to a simpler heuristic.
When landing at an airport when you know several connections are lost due to local issue with your airline, always get on the phone as soon as you get out of the aircraft. certainly call before heading to the kiosk and lining up for the lone agent to support you
Because, by the time the sole agent gets to listen to your issue, the next flight will be fully booked, and your hopes of getting out quickly will be gone.
Bear in mind that many airlines allow ticketing staff at the airport (that is if they didn't get rid of them all, yes, I'm looking at you, British Airways at LHR) much more leeway in terms of rerouting, particularly on other routes or indeed carriers.
We had this on 25 December, our flight to London was cancelled. Automatically rebooked to our destination later that day, but our party (2 adults, 3 kids) was split up across two separate flights several hours apart.
Of course I had already phoned in even before we got the rebooking. email, airline phone agent said that's what they have, both of those flights now full so no chance of getting us all together. Asked about other departure points, told no.
Queued at ticketing desk for 45 mins, asked to be reunited on flight to the same destination but from a different departure airport, 2h away, agent did it immediately, checked us in and handed over the new boarding passes.
Don't underestimate just how much changes when the tickets move to airport control at T-24h
> The problem is WN doesn’t interline with other carriers
I've not had the pleasure of WN, but have used several European LCCs. There are some situations where good travel insurance is possibly the only thing you can rely on.
Fix your own alternative travel (believe me, having been disrupted on Christmas Day this is sometimes easier said than done), demand a refund from your original carrier, and claim everything back from your insurer.
Better yet use the in-app or website self service functions to rebook yourself without waiting to talk to anyone. It is truly a race to grab the remaining seats on the next few flights.
Many airlines don't allow as much leeway in their self-service rebooking as they grant their own staff. This is perhaps ok if you're flying a route with many flights per day, but if you need even a minor reroute due to a cancellation, often the airline app refuses to even consider this, even if it saves your overall itinerary and is therefore definitely in the airline's interest too.
> If you are able to find alternative transportation to your final destination- DO IT. Another airline, bus, train, Lyft, rental car, ANYTHING. Southwest WILL NOT be able to get you to your destination anytime in the next few days.
I don't work for Southwest, but, I have friends that do.
The situation is kind of amplified by the fact that they are now doing crew scheduling by hand -- their crew scheduling system went offline at some point during this fiasco -- and because they aren't a hub and spoke style of airline, they don't have flight attendants at their hubs...so, what's happening is that flight attendants are scheduled for a "leg" of a trip, from Altoona to Boston to Columbus to Dallas to Edison. This flight attendant will be on that plane from Altoona until they wrap up in Edison. Because of this interruption, they cancel the flight from Altoona to Boston. Now, they need to find a plane (and a crew) in Boston to fly the leg from Boston to Columbus...cascading failures throughout their system. Add in phone system failures, a winter storm, and the busiest travel week of the year, and you've got what Southwest has right now.
You have crew timing out, crews that are abandoned at stations, and some folks telling people to not expect their luggage for 30+ days. Southwest has also been delaying negotiating with their ground crew (it's been three+ years since they've had a contract), so, I'm almost certain that when they got the Denver "Operational Emergency" email on the 21st, most of them said screw it and quit: every other airline has struggled to hire experienced folks and my guess is that it won't be long until they're re-employed somewhere else
They've cancelled most flights until Friday, with the exception being flight for aircraft staging, and will struggle to find open seats for their flight attendants to ride on other airlines (even if they are flying space-positive) just so they can have crew at locations for flights.
This does not sound unique to Southwest, I imagine all airlines have to do this to get people staged in the right places. Which means our air travel system is basically a just-in-time system and as we've learned JIT systems break quickly when there are shortages. Software problems and a lack of schedulers may be contributing to this event, but it seems like it could happen to any airline and is something of an infrastructure weakness in global transport. In fact, airlines might sometimes book flights for pilots and attendents on competitors planes, which may mean the lack of flights by Southwest could affect other airlines placement of personnel, so there may be some contagion risk.
It’s much easier to reflow assets where you need them in a hub and spoke system.
Since WN operates a linear modal across the US, they have to essentially reset the entire network state to get flights back to normal. Hence cancelling 2/3 of flights for the remainder of the week.
Extreme nitpick on my part: Southwest isn't actually a legacy carrier: they were one of the first "low-cost" carriers to begin interstate travel after the airlines were deregulated in 1978. The only remaining legacy carriers in the US are Delta, American, United, Hawaiian, and Alaska.
It sounds reasonable but I’m surprised that it’s not “cost efficient” to have a few sore planes and crews strategically located around the USA - you’d only need three or four to be able to respond within hours to any scheduling mishap. Margins must be quite low.
Yes margins on the core flying are pathetically low. Planes are $50 million+ pieces of capital equipment and high utilization is the only way to make the numbers work. Southwest is legendary for their quick turns which keep utilization high. It's just not as resilient during irregular operations.
Ryanair in Europe pretty much operates the same with many small hubs and point-to-point flights, but for some reason they are also run objectively a very reliable operation. Wonder why that is.
RyanAir does a lot of point to point but they don’t do it the way WN does. RyanAir will have a plane make multiple runs on say, London to Rome. WN will work a plane from Oakland to Denver to Dallas to Florida (I’m just picking WN concentration cities, that’s not a real route). In fact, something crazy like 30% of WN planes will hit Florida daily.
That period also included a massive expansion of Southwest’s footprint— something like 18 cities. I fly a lot and never had much trouble with them until this last week. United and American have been far worse for me in terms of delays and cancellations, not to mention their disgruntled staffs.
No. Southwest staff is almost never disgruntled. They're hired and known for their positive attitudes. The company culture is very different from other airlines, which is why there are a lot of books written about it.
I've flown Southwest dozens of times. While I like their lower costs it's pretty easy to see where they are cutting costs with operations. In "normal" conditions their cost cutting is just functional. In any sort of exceptional situation their entire system fall apart.
On what other occasion has their entire system fallen apart? Most every other passenger I encountered during this debacle said something to the effect of “this never happens on Southwest”. I do agree that they’ve been squeezing the system (especially labor) the last few years during their covid expansion, however. This weather was apparently the final straw.
The inc article I linked to above has several examples of other days where SWA cancelled hundreds to a thousand flights at one time. But today has clearly dwarfed even the worst of the previous incidents.
Yes, the scale is completely different. As the commenter after you noted, the events you're referring to happen all the time with other airlines as well.
This one affected a lot of people traveling to the 2021 US Grand Prix in Austin & it supposedly didn't affect Southwest [my Alaska flight was cancelled after four hours of "any minute now"]:
Southwest flies all the flights it markets, they do not contract regional carriers for any flights like all of the airlines SkyWest is contracted by.
Regional carriers typically operate smaller aircraft with less senior crew and sorta serve to expand the mainline carriers markets and also often serve to feed the mainline carriers experienced pilots for their mainline aircraft.
I have a Southwest flight on Friday I am now very nervous about. For the first time ever I bought a fully refundable flight as a backup option through American Airlines. Looks like Southwest might allow free cancellations too so I might ditch that flight entirely to avoid undue travel headaches. Either way, I don’t ever remember a worst traveling season than this.
The right credit card, if you have one or can get one, usually includes "insurance" for travel delays, lost luggage, cancellations etc. I always forget about the benefits other than "points" but there are some great ones.
Recently, I was glad I used the right card to book an airbnb which we had to cancel day of check-in. Full refund on a non-refundable airbnb.
Chase sapphire cards and anything competing with that. FWIW getting reimbursed through my capital one ventureX card took over six months and was a major pain. Claims were handled by eclaimsline which capital one told me was part of Visa not themselves, it’s the only time I’ve used it so I don’t know if that’s common for other cards like Chase. Maybe they handle it it house and do a better job.
Southwest has always allowed free cancellations, up to 10 minutes before boarding— that was one of its main selling points. You (normally) get the money as flight credit, however.
An expiring flight credit, which is perhaps less desirable than the cash you paid.
A few months ago, they monkeyed with our departure time, and we correctly concluded that it would end up missing the connecting flight. The booking agent couldn't give us anything but time-bomb vouchers, but I got cash by emailing customer support. I used the federal wording for "elected not to travel" and "substantially different itinerary," which may have helped me not have any issues.
Yup! Noticed that. Although I wish they had spent more time and resources on improving the staff scheduling system rather than adding a new fare class ("Wanna get away plus") and trying to milk the boarding system for extra cash.
Pre COVID and especially during COVID wasn't bad, as long as you didn't mind wearing a mask.
Post COVID you have everyone and their mom trying to make up for 2 years of missed vacations and being stuck at home. And they're angry as hell - the post COVID population seems wreckless and short fused, for reasons I don't exactly know.
Was just at the airport. Waited 2.5 hours in line to be told that ticketing will show up tomorrow at 7 am. Then went home and was on hold for 4 hours. You are lucky if you call and don't get a busy tone.
But my story isn't bad. Hearing other people's story at the airport in line was shocking. Family with kids stuck in connections for days. No hotels, little food, crowded lines. Bags? Somewhere in the country.
I’m seriously wondering about Southwest’s software systems at the moment. I was traveling with a youth sports team on American early this month. We had a flight cancellation that resulted in about 30 people needing to find new flights. You just popped open the app or website and were given multiple options to rebook.
My brother had a flight canceled on southwest Thursday night. It was completely impossible to rebook or even cancel on their website at that point. The phone and physical lines were impossible, so we just booked a new flight for the following day in order to get him home for Christmas, it wasn’t even much more than his original flight. The next day his original reservation was “automatically rebooked” on a flight for Christmas morning. He kept the new booking and didn’t cancel the rebooked leg till he was wheels up. Craziest thing was the flight wasn’t full. He got an entire row to himself.
The fact that southwest doesn’t seem to have the ability to let customers self rebook in situations like this seems to be a major IT/software failing.
Southwest tries to send more flights per day by reducing time at the gate. Most of the time it’s great, since it means cheaper flights and less time as a passenger waiting around for folks to find their seat number. They have lots of hubs, so it’s easy to find a flight that fits your needs.
But when things go wrong en masse, error propagates through the system fast. It’s the same failure mode as just-in-time manufacturing. There just aren’t gaps in the schedule for lots of things to go wrong, nor extra planes to pick up the slack. I’d recommend Southwest still, but not if your schedule is tight and the flight is can’t-miss.
I suspect there are some other problems in their tech stack and personnel they have to sort out too.
I was impacted by this. I had three flights canceled in four days. My bags are still somewhere in Denver. I ended up rebooking on American. I'm certainly going to try to make Southwest pay for it, once their phone lines clear up.
Southwest is going to need to go above and beyond to fix this or they're done in my book. I will choose a more expensive option over them. I'll choose a less direct route. This Russian Roulette but every chamber's loaded game has been an enormous, stressful waste of time.
None of the hacks suggested here work when the customer service phone line is down, the website doesn't work, and every other flight is cancelled or full.
All my property restored as it was (whether physically or through paying for replacement costs).
Full reimbursement for replacement flights, clothes, rental cars, gas, food, and other expenses incurred due to their negligence.
Some kind of additional multiplier on top of that as an apology for the stress inflicted.
On my American flight tonight I added up just the total I've paid to fix Southwest's screwup, and it's already almost $1k before my luggage and not counting the refunded cost of my trip. My baggage foolishly contained at least one article of clothing which is genuinely irreplaceable. I don't know how I'd calculate the cost of that.
So we're looking at two or three grand of compensation before I ever even consider being a customer again.
This year, I've had a perfect record: 3 air trips, and my luggage got lost on all 3. And yet every single bag got delivered eventually.
If you think about it, it's a matter of geometry: Airports don't have infinite storage space, so much as they'd like to lose luggage permanently, airlines have to deliver it to customers to make room for new lost luggage. And as bad as most carriers are, they wont resort to outright wanton destruction of luggage.
Slight tangent on this and something I've always wondered: if something as basic yet extremely crucial as scheduling software is outdated (SWA might very well be on a mainframe or transmitting CSV files in an FTP server and that server could've acted up), how on earth are they expected to scale and adopt new tech? It seems like a ticking time bomb and gross mismanagement.
Fortunately I'm not flying this week, but I've already seen and experienced numerous meltdowns from SWA in the past. If this doesn't signal a wake-up call to invest in tech infrastructure for any company I don't know what else will.
There are a multitude of different ways to bridge from mainframe (IBM Websphere MQ/Host integration server) systems or to make file based systems look mostly online (small, frequent batch files). So technically it is possible and done pretty reliablly for banks and the like.
Extending use cases to cover behaviours that were not covered by the original software is where things get exciting. You will end up with a hodge podge of systems & processes that try to implement multi-step work flows and deal with failures through manual or equally complex automated methods to compensate.
Generally most industries are pretty terrible at evolving the solutions they have or completely replacing them. So you will see a multi-generational set of systems that are in place to provide an acceptably current set of behaviours.
This situation can arise due to varying commercial pressures, however Developer and Engineer's inability to communicate what the system currently does and what is easy and hard to change in no small way contributes to following paths that result in poor system outcomes over the lifetimeof systems.
Southwest is one of the few airlines that has non-stops from AUS and Chicago and Kansas City, so I fly them almost exclusively. In general, I'm always impressed with how well everything is run, and how professional and friendly their crew are.
https://twitter.com/AtSouthwest/status/1606543397996855296
If true, it could account for a majority of SW's cancellations over the past few days and it could continue for the foreseeable future.