Originally Posted by
diver858
The airline industry has changed significantly since Herb started LUV. While I am no fan of Kelly or his tactics, LUV is now a $30 billion public company, his primary responsibility is to shareholders. I highly doubt Herb's approach would generate the returns demanded by today's institutional investors.
The belief that WN is "too big to fail", faithful will blindly remain loyal allow Kelly to act with impunity when dealing with labor. It will take a major, catastrophic event to force a significant change, carnage (figurative or literal) will be significant.
SWA has not faced many of the pitfalls that other airlines have faced-either by luck, or because of the goodwill of their employees (for example, having their employees pay for the company’s gas during the Persian Gulf War). When the other airlines were devastated by 9-11, Swa benefitted greatly and grew significantly, fuel hedging was obviously a huge benefit at that time...but since then they’ve lost hundreds of millions of dollars hedging....Unfortunately that employee goodwill and good fortune has put the airline in a “bubble”, where they believe they are immune from the pitfalls that have affected “big airline”-those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it (or something like that)
but the bigger question is how does Southwest Airlines go from a company whose employees purchased the company’s fuel, to an airline that sues its own employees?