Kurt Heidemann:
Today's SWAPA Number is 3. On our Contract 2020 negotiating team, we call our core of scheduling SMEs, SRC3. That's Scott Plyler, Dan O'Connor, and Meagan Neland, who are the individuals most responsible for the complete rewrite of our work rules. On this episode, Meagan will be filling in for my usual partner, Amy Robinson.
Meagan Nelan:
We're going to sit down with my partner, Scott and Dan for a discussion about those scheduling sections of contract 2020, where we started and where we ended up.
I'm Meagan Nelan.
Kurt Heidemann:
And I'm Kurt Heidemann, and here's our interview with SRC3.
SRC, I'd like to kick this off by just having a discussion, call it a Christmas fireside chat of where we are in the contract, what the motivations were that got us to this TA and the rewrite. So let's start there, with the rewrite.
Scott Plyler:
Had a lot of issues that came up during the SEP process, comments on surveys, pain points for pilots, things that pilots wanted, and certainly just working with contract admin and talking to pilots and doing education. Our current book was ambiguous, confusing, lots of processes that were not in there, a lot of policies that were not in there. So it took a lot of corporate knowledge just to keep track of it. So the rewrite was to help make everything a lot more clear. Some of the language had stuff that said, "This is the limit except in this case and except in this case, but sometimes not, but except in this case," and it really didn't help out. So that's really part of where the rewrite came from, at least in the scheduling section, is just to try to take care of all of these issues as well as introduce a lot of new processes.
Meagan Nelan:
When you think about what's happened the last 10 years, it's such a different airline then when that contract was written, the current book. The Wright Amendment went away, we acquired AirTran, flying international, flying ETOPS. We have a brand new FAR-117. So I do think that there's all those different factors that also drove the need to just completely rewrite the entire thing to better capture the way things one, worked today. And then two, improve the way things could work today.
Kurt Heidemann:
You mentioned the SEP process. Take us back to that time and for the people that weren't here at the time, explain what that process was and how that informed where we went, but what else did it incorporate?
Meagan Nelan:
It was the summer of 2017. I still remember when Casey Murray, he was the NC chair at that time, and the outcome of that last ratification was, we need to just rewrite this entire thing.
Dan O'Connor:
Yeah, that's when we started talking about it. And actually when we first started this process, we actually sat back in SRC and whiteboarded. We actually have a list. We took pictures, actually it's still back there. All the stuff that pilots hate made a complete list rig absorbing reassignments, CQT move ups. We listed all the different things and then we went through that SEP process you're talking about survey, educate, poll. Like Megan said, Casey started that back in 2017, that process, and I know Kurt, you were definitely a big part of that, but everyone took part in that. And what that was, for those of you that weren't here is we surveyed all the pilots in every different area, whether it's schedule planning or vacation, benefits.
We asked the pilots, what are your main concerns? So we gathered those almost like blank sheet surveys, gathered those, they're all analyzed. And then we educated the pilots on all those different issues. We said, "Okay, this is what you asked for. Here's some details about that, how it would flow out in our contract, how it would work at Southwest at education on it." And we went back and polled the pilots, we had them rank different things, what was important to them and polled on what they would like to see change in the next contract. So we took that, and actually that pretty much matched what we had on the whiteboard as far as things pilots hate.
We adjusted that from the polling and then we went into the language and started working. Now how do we address this? Do we address it with an override? Do we address it with provisions or do we address it with just a new process? So that's what really drove the language in contract 2020 was that SEP cycle. So the language is based on what the pilots responded was their most important things to address.
Meagan Nelan:
And the education piece of that too. That's when we really started to dig into scheduling data based on feedback on is this a chronic problem? What is the right way to address it? And that shaped a lot of those negotiating points, which was that educate part of that process.
Dan O'Connor:
And this has been an iterative process. Obviously in the last year, other major airlines have come to agreements, so we did a lot of research and actually reached out to them asking how different things worked and we incorporated what they were able to achieve in their contract in different areas and talked to them how things work. So that was invaluable also. So we had to change as we went along and as the market changed, and that's where we ended up with this language.
Scott Plyler:
And we're all like a community. The other airlines, we put out all this education and surveys and we had host our own conference in 2019. We went to another conference in 2021, and a lot of these items that we talked about wound up in other airline contracts. Like leg change override, there's a form of that in American, United and Delta's contracts now. So something that started as an idea in 2018 amongst us internally, all of a sudden we're seeing now everybody else has it. And it was one of our foundational goals for contract 2020 to begin with, but it became even more imperative to get because everybody else was doing it.
Kurt Heidemann:
What do you guys think is the balance between, you're talking about the data, you're talking about the pilot sentiment, and then you're talking about OALs. And so describe to the listeners how those all come together into what we're asking for, or how do we prioritize?
Scott Plyler:
First of all, we respond to our own membership. That's what we're here for. We certainly have individual opinions amongst our committee on the negotiating committee and SRC, but ultimately we serve our pilot groups, so we need to take that into account first and foremost. But we also have to take a look at, well, somebody says there's a problem. Well, how often does that happen? How big of an issue is that?
What are the different ways that we could address that? We do look to other airlines for how they address things, but they also run their operation very differently than we do sometimes. And so we have to take into account our Southwestiness sometimes as well. So even some concepts at other airlines might not work so well at Southwest, it might make things more inefficient, might make our pairings different, any number of things, but we can take those ideas and try to transform them into something that works not just for our pilots, but works at our airline within our systems.
Meagan Nelan:
It's probably worth pointing out too, that some of the issues here are unique because of the fact that you all fly the exact same aircraft. You don't have different types of fleets, so your vacancies are different. The way your schedule can change is different. There's some flexibility that comes with that too, which I think that we've really achieved some great gains with this rewrite, but there's things that we needed to address here that aren't always a problem elsewhere, if that makes sense.
Dan O'Connor:
And Megan brought up a really good point down the rewrite, Kurt, not every process is changed. I got that question quite a bit. A lot of concern out there. "Why are you doing a rewrite? I like this, or I like that." Not all the processes have changed, but for all the reasons Scott talked about before, it was important to rewrite it to get the flow right. The flow is more of a pilot thinking of flow from planning, additional flying change of flying through execution reserve. It's more of how a pilot would think of it and the language now is clear to read, it flows better and I think it's better for both us and the company honestly to have less ambiguous language. It sets expectations for both the pilots and for the company.
Kurt Heidemann:
I don't want to really describe the inner workings of negotiations, but Scott brought up, I think he called it the Southwestiness of our operation and how we are a bit unique. How did this all play out in terms of negotiating with the company's SMEs? Did they recognize some of the things that we needed to achieve? We achieved quite a bit. So was that a constructive process or how did we get to where we are today?
Dan O'Connor:
Well, one of the issues we came to learn through the process is while we're sitting on one side of the table and we're looking at the entire picture, we're looking at the whole process and how it touches every other area. The company's group, they come from a little bit more of a siloed division as far as they have a planning group, they have more of a scheduling day of execution group, that sort of thing. So while they're addressing their particular area, we're thinking about that in the context of how does it affect the other areas, also.
Kurt Heidemann:
That holistic approach that we've talked about all along, you mean?
Dan O'Connor:
Absolutely. When you talk about things, we can talk about a few examples later, but Scott brought up, LCO, even some of the vacation provisions, you have to think about the downflow effects of those and the secondary effects, good or bad, and how it's going to affect the pilots.
Scott Plyler:
It definitely was a process getting to actually agreements and language. It was definitely a hard no even up until June and early July, and part of it was because of the rewrite and the process that we went through. They were very resistant to a rewrite because a rewrite meant it got rid of past practice and they actually had to sit and agree to every single new provision and what it actually meant and get it in the notes. And that was part of the process. We were trying to get rid of past practice, things that were unwritten and scheduling policies. We wanted to establish a new base, so it was certainly a hard no. Even our mediators were like, "We're not getting anywhere," and they put it into our plate to do something about it.
We had five different sections in scheduling that we were still working on and we weren't getting very far. And SRC, we had a little summit there in July and we holed up, got a hotel in the conference room and we just got away from all the distractions and we went through every section and we merged both the company's proposal and our proposal, merged it together, re-flowed it accounted for all of the current language, which we struck a lot of and put in where our new language would fit into that. It was quite a process, but we had to do that to get us down to one document where we could all agree and see what was actually being struck and what was actually being retained and what things were new.
And I think that's what jump started the process there in late July because the mediators saw that effort to make progress in negotiations and to take into account some of the company's concerns about retaining some current language-ish stuff. But in the end, I think the mediators were able to convince the company to go ahead and negotiate off of that one document because it had both proposals, both company and SWAPA proposals in it.
Meagan Nelan:
I'd like to point out that current book section five, what we did was we took that and we line by line brought over everything that we had in our original proposal, which was a separate schedule planning and a separate schedule execution. I think we were at 50, 60 pages by the end of it with just all of the tracking of things getting struck and things getting modified. It ultimately it got broken back out into a planning section and an execution section, which is what made sense. It's just interesting that we had to go through that whole process of a bloodbath of language honestly, to get pretty much where we started.
Kurt Heidemann:
I just remember back prior to that July period that I think our pilots would be interested in the fact that for two, almost three years straight, we would pass our proposal and the company would ignore it and pass back their proposal and we'd do the same and we just talked past each other for years until you guys sat down and forced the issue. I think that that was really a key moment in these negotiations.
I'd also like to add that once we did merge those documents, and in the last six months the company has made a good faith effort, I think, to negotiate from that document and they have gotten on board with the rewrite and as Scott mentioned, discussing various provisions and ensuring that there's alignment between the two parties. Would you agree with that?
Dan O'Connor:
I think that's true. I do think they made more of a good faith effort after that work was done. I don't think there was really any going back after that. And I do think that that was a pivot point, not that they agreed everything all at once. It still took quite a bit of discussion and negotiation, but you're right, passing back those documents, crossing out each other's language and passing it back and forth, we were getting nowhere. So until that was done, we just took the time to merge them all.
Scott Plyler:
I'll pat ourselves on the back a little bit, but the mediators were very skeptical that we were going to be able to do a rewrite even just in the scheduling sections, let alone the entire contract. Nobody else in the industry tried to do a rewrite. The fact of the matter is we now have a full rewrite of the scheduling and the whole contract, but particularly the scheduling sections. And ultimately, it turned out to be pretty much the flow that we had originally proposed back in 2020 and now it's all backed by extensive notes from the room.
Meagan Nelan:
Okay, so we were talking earlier about how we did the whiteboard with all of the pain points, which then fed into the education and that follow-on polling. So I believe that we achieved some foundational must haves. That's how we shaped them, walk us through those.
Scott Plyler:
Definitely to set ourselves up for negotiations. We created our own internal hierarchy of what things we thought we absolutely had to have, our foundational must haves, and then must haves, and then sort of must haves, and then nice to haves and just a whole lot of laundry lists. After looking back at those lists now it seems like we've achieved over 90% of what we originally asked for, which is a little surprising, but because it's negotiations, but it's the way the market's turned out.
But some of the major ones that are foundational ones were getting fully rigged open time, getting a leg change override, getting a training bid and then more uncovered flying through open time in order to cut down on the reassignment. So those were some of the major items and they certainly were achieved. And the reason why they were foundational for us, because fully rigged open time, it's not just about getting paid correctly for what you pick up an open time. It's what all the downline effects are from having fully rigged open time. For example, when you have that, you eliminate the low paying chads that would get rigged anyway when they go to a reserve or get awarded in POT.
So the company's not really saving any money there, but now pilots might actually pick it up and then that means less reserves get used. There's less reserve gamesmanship by scheduling trying to, "Okay, well these two legs on this chad, I'm trying to deadhead somebody from Baltimore out to Denver just to fly one more leg and deadhead back." And that went hand in hand also with the leg change override. Once we had that, those two together work really well together. So that's just one example of how we had these foundational items that flowed into a lot of other parts of our contract.
Meagan Nelan:
I would add that from the crew scheduler experience, what Scott was just saying about deadheading people to cover one leg that was a big focus was utilizing inbound reserves in such a way that you could break a trip completely apart and cover it all on inbound reserves regardless of the amount of deadheading, regardless of the costs. A lot of times you don't even save any trip for pay versus just awarding something premium. So the changes that we've achieved in additional flying and in reserve, a lot of that behavior is going to completely change because it's restricted now.
Dan O'Connor:
And I would say another one of our goals, just overarching goals, was to increase efficiency, especially in the scheduling area. So for example, we have more rules about what can be exported and what could be split to split to cover because that was driving a lot of the inefficiencies that we were seeing, to be able to use reserves here or there exporting all over the place with deadheads. So now we have more rules about running things through premium before doing those different processes. Just to keep it more efficient, along with what Scott was saying with the Foley rigged open time.
Meagan Nelan:
I think the quality of what falls to reserve is going to improve and then what we've achieved in reserve, your ability to proffer and then to be released, the reserve experience is going to be better. And if you don't want to get released and you want to play the game, if they start swapping trips out on you, it's going to be very costly because all of that will pay LCO. So I think that any avenue that you take, there's gains.
Kurt Heidemann:
What do you guys say to the pilots who think to themselves the inefficiency of the schedule is really where we make our money. They capitalize on all these deadheads without block, but they're making pay on that. Do you think that they should be concerned about that or do you think that there's enough in this deal?
Scott Plyler:
Well, certainly a lot of us on the SRC when we're not playing union, we play the system just as much. That's part of why we're on the SRC is because we actually understand a lot of how this works. So while there is the consideration for we don't want to destroy that flexibility or the ability to make more money, we also have an obligation to, frankly who the majority of our pilot group that really just likes to trade a little bit and then go fly their line, they want to be back on time. They don't want to have crazy days.
And we have an obligation to that majority. The open time players, so to speak, are not the majority of our pilots, so we have to keep that balance there. What I will say is that anybody that already knows how to work your schedule and work, the system right now is going to see, yes, the cheese got moved, but they're going to see where there's still plenty of opportunity to enhance your pay and your quality of life through our scheduling systems. We haven't made it more restrictive. We've actually increased the flexibility.
Meagan Nelan:
I think that's where knowing your contract is going to just really be important because from beginning to end, from vacation, now you have the ability to shift your vacation. So it's not all going to be shifting the way you bid your line. You can shift your vacation instead to then bid a line that you would otherwise normally bid. So that then has a downline effect on what falls into blank lines. You have to piece it all together.
Scott Plyler:
And to be clear, this is the change where you can shift your vacation up to three days prior to actually bidding your line. That allows the senior pilots to bid weekdays now and get overlap, which will then allow more junior pilots to get awarded better weekend trips for overlaps. It'll create more weekday lines in the blank lines and everybody can have better customization of their vacation plans. So we see this as a net benefit across everything. But if you just look at the vacation shift language, you might not have thought too much about it, but all those downline effects really do help out.
Meagan Nelan:
Scott and Dan, I think that it's worth mentioning, I don't know if it's all that clear to pilots that we have parallel meetings happening outside of mediation. We also were meeting with the SMEs of SkySolver, we looked under the hood on what the hierarchies are and that flowed into what we ended up doing with the language. Would y'all want to touch a little bit about those discussions?
Scott Plyler:
Well, we certainly had a lot of discussions about how SkySolver actually works, some of the limitations of it, the fact that it doesn't retain your original pairing, it only looks at what you had previously and tries to get you back to what your last iteration was, which means it drives some of the crazy solutions where you deadhead and then deadhead some more and deadhead some more and then it starts to get out of control after a couple iterations.
Really, we were trying to address reassignments with reassignment preferences and also leg change override. So it was good that we achieved the leg change override first. One, because if we weren't able to be successful in the scheduling execution section and getting control of the reassignments, then it was basically, well, you're going to pay us anyway. So you probably need to find a way to take control of that.
Dan O'Connor:
I do believe that the collaboration on this, especially with SkySolver, has been better since the meltdown a year ago. There was a precipitous change in the attitude to bring us in. That, along with negotiations to kind of show us what they're doing with the reprogramming, like Scott said, to reprogramming SkySolver more of the hierarchy to get a pilot back by his original release time on his last day of his pairing. So that has helped us during negotiations to get where we're at with pilot preferences and where he ended up with footprint protection.
So initially, we had proposed several different pilot preferences, basically a list of inputs from the pilot for reassignment. But through working with the company, we realized those may not be the most efficient or possible. So we do have a footprint protection preference now in the contract. And this goes along hand in hand with how they are reprogramming SkySolver at this time.
Scott Plyler:
We were able to in negotiations, we actually pulled on what pilots wanted out of reassignments and it basically came down to the number one preference was to be back on time. Certainly there's a lot of reassignments, what happens within that footprint that pilots want to have more control over. And we dealt with some of that with some of the duty time changes and a little bit with the LCO, but getting back on time seemed to be the number one thing in pilot polling. Not that everybody wants to be back on time.
Like you mentioned, what about the guys that want to make more money? Well, that's why we retained not just the footprint preference, but just the get back on the same day preference. So those pilots that don't mind getting a little extra money, you get reassigned, you get back after your original release time, now you're getting a hundred percent LCO. But there are a lot of pilots that truly need to be back, whether it's to catch a commute flight, they have personal obligations. That's really important, so that's why we focused on that just in the last month actually in getting the scheduling execution section figured out.
Meagan Nelan:
So I just want to emphasize, just to close up this whole SkySolver discussion, is that a big part of the implementation plan is to now better capture what your original was. And so that changes the way SkySolver's optimized. It's not necessarily going to send you back to your original if it doesn't make sense to. You might have a completely re-flowed assignment, but the goal is to get you back on time, if not earlier, which could garnish a lot more LCO than just getting you back on your original. So there's going to be just lucrative opportunities in that.
Kurt Heidemann:
That was something that caught my attention in these negotiations was the company's insistence that cost isn't a factor in the reassignment when they're putting the pieces of the operation back together. So that goes along with this change in philosophy to get back within the footprint instead of getting back to the trip?
Meagan Nelan:
Yeah, because now that you've got everything stackable and it's not absorbed by rigs, it changes just that entire framework.
Scott Plyler:
I do think because of the meltdown and the fact that they lost track of 3000 pilots out online for a couple of hours, a few days, they've recognized how badly there needed to be upgrades to SkySolver, and just reassignments in general to do the smart thing for the operation regardless of what a TFP cost might be, that that's not really the best way to do it. I'm sure mitigate it when you can, but honestly, it's better to flow a pilot on a largely unchanged pairing or on what was originally scheduled on somebody else and you just reflow it to a different pilot instead of breaking things up, having all those connection times, additional deadheads. All those additional points of failure when the original deadlines, those duty periods tend to be pretty good. They have a lot of margin in them and they need to retain that. So that's coming with the updates to SkySolver is keeping some of that margin and doing smart reassignments instead of just trying to cover things at the lowest cost.
Meagan Nelan:
It's good for the airline, reliability trumps the cost now.
Kurt Heidemann:
The last thing I'd like to just touch on real quick before we wrap this up is, JA. I know it's down from where it was when we went through the mess of 2021 and 2022, but it's still a concern to our pilots. Can you describe the changes that we have there and how we captured those changes?
Dan O'Connor:
Quick reminder on this, we did write this language prior to COVID. So yes, the last couple of years have really highlighted JA because we've had so many in the last couple of years, but this language is actually written before all of that happened. But we were addressing JA. And the way we looked at this, some people call to eliminate JA, but unfortunately that would just lead to more reassignments, which is not what our pilots wanted.
So what we did is look to address the issue starting at the beginning of the process. In other words, in each phase. So the planning phase, for example, better pairing mixes, lower APL, in other words, more shorter pairings, turns in two days. We know those execute better and they don't have to get broken up if they do go into open time. So that was a place we started with that. And then when they do go into open time now we have fully rigged open time and other rules like premium before split to cover. So that will further mitigate it. And then we added a new process, VDT, voluntary double time to replace VPF. This will take place before they JA a pilot, so it'll be offered to other pilots at double time pay.
So JA is a good example how we try to address an issue by looking at it from start to finish in all the different areas of the scheduling process to mitigate it. And then if it does need to get done, we looked at adding more protections for the JA pilot as far as hotels before or after. Must rides if necessary, if they can't get home after a JA. We now have double time now pays on the legs or the duty period rigs, DPM or DHR. So they're going to pay a minimum of 10 a day for a JA duty period. And also we have a new concept called PNZ personal net zero. So you can recover days that were lost to JA through ELIT.
Scott Plyler:
We did try to mitigate JA right from the beginning and then with the pairings and changes to open time, even with the reassignment preferences, allowing pilots to go longer than their footprint. And then we address the pay as well, which was always a big concern. One of the pain points. And then the last thing is that once you actually are on a JA, whether it's an overnight JA or a full pairing, JA, you're working on a day that you had us scheduled off. It's not like you volunteered for, it was involuntary. And we added some provisions about what they could do to you once you were on that JA duty period. You shouldn't just be reassigned just because you're at work.
Though we heard that in negotiations a few times, "Well, you're already at work, we might as well be able to use you." It's like, "No, just because you did something bad to the pilot doesn't mean you continue doing something awful." So we changed what you could be reassigned for to things that make sense. You have a cancellation, or you go illegal, well of course you need to be reassigned. Or if they can get you back sooner than your original release on that JA, then certainly that would be desirable.
And then we also address getting released from Deadheads as being automatic. You fly that one extra leg to an unscheduled overnight and it's just deadhead back the next day. There should be no question about whether you can get released from that or not. You should just be released, and that's what we achieved.
Meagan Nelan:
We're going to have a video on LCO and pay multiples and there's some JA examples, both just what JAs pay and then if they start getting reassigned, what that pays. I'd highly encourage everybody to go view that information, because I think that that's also going to show the penalties that are surrounding these JAs re-assignment too.
Well Scott, we've been talking quite a while and I think we covered a lot of really good information about just the holistic scheduling model that we've achieved in this rewrite. Do you have any parting thoughts?
Scott Plyler:
We have a lot of podcasts about what the actual changes were. I just want to say that overall every section we've increased the amount of pilot flexibility and choices, and we've even gotten some more SWAPA involvement with collaboration language. There's the training bid, reserve proffers, footprint protection, all those things. We've pretty much achieved the goal of the rewrite in addressing pretty much every pain point that our pilots told us back in the SEP process, and as we went through COVID and even coming out of it.
So we hope that when everybody goes through the scheduling sections in particular, don't just look at the individual provisions, look at how they interplay with everything else and take that holistic look that we were trying to get the company to see. And that was our approach. And I hope that everybody will recognize that we made a lot of gains, quality of life, pay, flexibility in scheduling. And we achieved the rewrite in a lot clearer language so everybody has better expectations about what's going on. Honestly, it's about damn time we did that.
Kurt Heidemann:
I want to say thanks to SRC3 for giving us a look into the process and the philosophy of the work rules rewrite today.
Meagan Nelan:
As always, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line at [email protected].
Kurt Heidemann:
And finally, today's bonus number is 109. That's the total number of pages of rewritten work rules in the TA.
Meagan Nelan:
And I'd like to mention that that was more than double when we had to track all of the changes.
Kurt Heidemann:
That just goes to show you what effort went into modernizing and improving our scheduling work rules in Contract 2020.