According to Accountable.US, a nonpartisan watchdog that works to expose corporate excess and greed, Southwest has had numerous chances to strengthen its operations in anticipation of a snowmageddon weekend like we just experienced, but it opted instead to make the rich richer.
As travelers and airline workers reel from mass flight cancellations, a corporate watchdog noted Wednesday that Southwest spent nearly $6 billion on stock buybacks in the years ahead of the coronavirus pandemic instead of spending that money technological improvements that unions have been demanding for years.
According to Accountable.US, the crisis Southwest has experienced in recent days amid a massive winter storm was “a problem of its own making,” noting that the airline opted “to spend $5.6 billion on stock buybacks in the three years leading up to the pandemic rather than making investments in infrastructure to be better prepared for extreme weather events like this week.”
The watchdog group added that the company “even reinstated dividends earlier this month, the first major airline to do so after the pandemic.”
The corporate watchdog also noted that Southwest is poised to report higher earnings for the fourth quarter as a result of “sky-high fares.”
Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, argued that Southwest essentially gambled away its customers’ holiday vacations, assuming it could get by on a shoestring without oafishly tripping on it and falling headlong into a puddle of briny Christmas tears.
”Southwest Airlines made a risky gamble that mass layoffs and spending billions of dollars on handouts to investors rather than fixing infrastructure would pay off with record profits,” stated Herrig. “The airline lost that bet badly, and now their customers are left paying the price, including the thousands stranded in the middle of holiday season travel. Southwest’s well-compensated executives could have prioritized its workers and customers by preparing for the worst, but greed trumped all as they put a small group of wealthy investors first. Consumers shouldn’t be the ones stuck holding the bag for Southwest’s greedy management decisions, but here we are. This is where the Transportation Department should start investigating why this happened.”
According to Capt. Mike Santoro, the vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, the extreme winter weather was only a “catalyst” for the travel bottleneck. The biggest problem, he says, was the company’s outdated software.
[Santoro] explained the system tracks the company’s pilots and flight attendants’ whereabouts, but it got so overloaded that it could not keep up.“When we get out of position, it’s a tough task for our schedulers to put it back together, and right now they’re having to do it by hand,” he explained. “The problem is the software just doesn’t keep track of us.”
Southwest flight attendants, via a Dec. 26 statement from their union, note not just the same problems, but also don’t hold back when describing their impact.
From the statement:
… the union points to years of neglect in securing and implementing technology that would make the difference for flight crews, employees and also customers. The result: thousands of crew members stranded across the country, some forced to sleep on cots in airports, some in hotels without power or water, and far too many working long hours well past acceptable duty days, and more. Trying to get home for Christmas seems like a dream to flight attendants who are struggling with the nightmare of simply trying to secure appropriate shelter, food and rest.
“The way Southwest Airlines has treated its flight crews can only be termed ‘despicable,’” said Lyn Montgomery, president of TWU Local 556, the union of Southwest Airlines flight attendants. “We know the demands of holiday travel. We know winter storms. And believe me, we know about stepping up and putting in long work hours when we are called to do so; we are flight attendants.”
Meanwhile, in an episode that was roughly the equivalent of Exxon executives traveling to Valdez, Alaska, to scream feckless obscenities at oil-covered ducks, Southwest travelers were threatened with arrest for standing around without “valid” tickets (the tickets weren’t valid because the flights on them were canceled).
And, of course, Southwest customers’ luggage was backed up as well. You simply won’t believe this beleaguered customer’s FUBAR story. Be sure to watch until the end.
Of course, while it may be human nature to want to scream at the person delivering bad news—and implementing bad policy—it should go without saying that Southwest ticket agents and other workers are not the villains here. It’s the men and women in the C-suite who deserve to be raked over the coals for these sorts of outcomes—but they rarely are.
In this revealing Substack column, journalist Adam Johnson notes that corporate practices, including deliberate understaffing, inevitably pit customers against customer service reps. In effect, it’s like shaking up a jar full of bugs and lying back with a cognac and cigar while they fight.
All of this is a toxic brew of mutual antagonism. “Customer satisfaction” is at a 17-year low, and the only human face people can take their frustration out on is a low-wage worker. Obviously there’s never an excuse to yell at anyone in customer service. The point is not a moral one—it’s that it’s by design. Indeed, corporate executives very much want you to vent your frustration on their low-wage workers. This way you get the vague feeling of agency and control in a system designed to remove any and all forms of it. Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters, absorbing all the frustration and anger brought about by our greasy, cost-cutting executives. Add to this the severe mental and physical harms—and death—laid at the feet of low wage workers during the pandemic, and our built-in system of mutual antagonism compounds dozens of other stressors.
We are conditioned to get mad at the human face we see before us, the “representative” of the company who personally profits nothing from our purchase. We are conditioned to get mad at the waiter when our food is late (and penalize this “bad service” with a bad tip) when the vast majority of the time it’s due to understaffing by a cheapskate boss. We are conditioned to get upset with the enforcer of arbitrary rules at a hotel checkout, despite it not being their rule at all. We are conditioned to be hostile to the very people we should have the most solidarity with.
For decades, worker wages have stagnated while the already obscenely wealthy have siphoned more and more wealth out of the economy. Corporations like love it this way. Occasionally they get caught with their pants down, but people tend to quickly forget. And so the government needs to have a longer memory when ordinary citizens don’t. Will the feds hold Southwest to account for literally ruining Christmas for thousands of Americans?
That remains to be seen, Politico notes.
Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday said his Transportation Department “will mount an extraordinary effort” to ensure Southwest Airlines, plagued by days of cancellations that have stranded thousands of passengers and aircrew nationwide, meets its obligations to its customers — including refunds.
…
Key congressional Democrats such as Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, have already said they plan to probe the matter when lawmakers return next year.
Of course, if you actually want corporations to be more responsive to their customers, it helps to elect progressive leaders instead of still more corporate-beholden greedheads who have shown time and again that they’re perfectly okay with the status quo.
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