Kurt Heidemann:
Today's SWAPA number is 33. That's the percentage of pilots who have joined Southwest Airlines since our last contract cycle between 2012 and 2016 which led to our current CBA and ended our last trip through mediation.
Amy Robinson:
So, on today's show, we're talking to SWAPA Communications Committee Chair, Mike Panebianco, about SWAPA's message moving forward. We'll also ask him to share with our newer members some of the history of SWAPA. He's also going to tell us what he sees as the most important thing our pilot group can do to help achieve Contract 2020 and what we can expect from the communications group as we roll through the next year.
Kurt Heidemann:
I'm Kurt Heidemann.
Amy Robinson:
And I'm Amy Robinson and here's our interview with Mike.
Kurt Heidemann:
Mike, at the end of 2022, you were named the new comm chair for SWAPA. Give us your elevator pitch on your vision of SWAPA Comm now and where you want to take it this year.
Mike Panebianco:
Yeah, so SWAPA Comm is already an incredible functioning team with a lot of great products. And coming into this team, getting up to speed and seeing all of the content that we put out as a union to our membership, not just to our membership, but on all levels, I think the one thing that we're going to add to it is more engagement and that via social media and events, especially considering where we are with our contract with Contract 2020 going into its third year. So, it's very much going to be a higher engagement opportunity for our membership and handing a little more ownership for activism to the members through our comm channels.
Amy Robinson:
So, one thing you've said before, Mike, is you have this three-pronged approach to that. Can you tell the membership a little bit what you have in mind there?
Mike Panebianco:
Yeah. So, sparking engagement is something that we want, it is one of the goals but the very first thing we needed to do is shore up our network and I see it happening over the last several weeks. More and more pilots are writing in and saying, "Hey, I'm not getting SWAPA emails". That's telling me that everything that you guys are doing as a comm team is working, that we're getting the message out to pilots to reconnect. Also, we've stood up our Instagram, we've done a little bit more work into our Facebook and we've also reengaged on LinkedIn, our Twitter channel is alive and well, pilots are actually going in and they're connecting. So, we see the amount of pilots getting hooked up with our comms increasing.
The second step is that sparking engagement. We have to give them something to do. I don't want people to just look at our social media or our emails and then just be done, we want them to have something to act upon. One of the things I think SWAPA does insanely well is produce high-quality educational information and we have so many SMEs that have put out so much data. I would venture to say that, if anyone went into our website, if I gave a test on where content is located and what content is there, I'd venture to say that it would not be as high a passing score as we'd like it to be.
So, getting everyone into our information and having them gain a comfort level of where it is and how to share it, that's that engagement that I'm looking for is that pilots know how to find all of this information and then be able to do something with it, either to share it, use it as a conversation point with other pilots or with people that they encounter.
And then the third part of that is get our message to where it makes a difference. For right now, I think our pilots are starting to understand that social media is very impactful. Not just our rallies, not just our pickets but how we do our job via our media channels. The way this podcast is heard by people outside of our pilot group, the RP is read by people outside of our pilot group, our tweets, the way our different social channels are received by different people in our audience, that's what we want to do. We want to make sure that there are as many opportunities to hear our message as possible.
Kurt Heidemann:
We have a large number of individual pilots who may not be fully on board with social media. Give them the pitch or explain to them why we are making this investment into those channels.
Mike Panebianco:
Well, a lot of pilots don't like social media simply because it draws time away. And if I ask you to go into social media, I'm not going to ask you to go in there to live in there. If I ask you to go into social media or SWAPA asks you to go into social media, it's to share a message. And a lot of pilots don't believe that they are going to make a difference if they don't have a following and that's not necessarily true. For Twitter, hashtags, even Instagram and a lot of other places, just by sharing a message that has tags in it, that does the work and that is activism, that is the ability for you to help push our message forward and get it to a bigger audience and that's where our contract is going to make the people that hold the keys to it a little bit more uncomfortable and a little more willing to come in and help us out. And obviously, the NC will tell us how we're doing but, social media, we're not asking you to make a lifestyle out of it, we're asking you to use it as a means to the ends of getting a contract.
Amy Robinson:
So, what would you say to encourage someone who is afraid of social media? What things would you say that would make them feel better about ... We have a lot of guys who are actually fearful of using social media for fear that it looks into their personal information or things like that.
Kurt Heidemann:
Or their company's social media policy, that's another concern, yeah.
Amy Robinson:
Right, that's another concern that people bring up a lot.
Mike Panebianco:
So, one of the things we are doing inside of SWAPA is making sure that we don't ask you to do something that will get you in trouble and we have a full legal department, we actually have an attorney that we've retained to look at what we are going to be doing with activism and what we share. Up to this point, most of what we've shared has been from the media which is completely fair game. It's out in the public space, it's not a violation of your social media policy. We will not ask you to do something that will put you at odds with our social media policy with Southwest Airlines and that's something that we're going to spend a lot of time with. So, if we ask you to share something, it's going to be something that's already passed through a filter of legal networks.
Kurt Heidemann:
When it comes to social media, you said we had various channels and they have different targets, I guess. Speak a little bit about that as far as the public and Wall Street and the company and how do you decide which targets which?
Mike Panebianco:
Sure. So, social media is a funny animal. While most of our pilots, you see almost 5,000 of our pilots are on the Contract 2020 page on Facebook. Facebook is a big pilot to pilot interpersonal communication channel. A lot of our traveling public is on Facebook, they see a lot of these articles when we share them out, our family members see them, Facebook is your neighborhood. Now, if you shift a little bit and go towards Twitter, Twitter is where a lot of the reporters live and the media, they grab a lot of news. I think I see it almost regularly, weekly, that Twitter is highest regarded as a news source. Instagram is a little more of a neighborhood thing as well, it's more of a mom and pop and cousins and friends and social media sharing of photos and media.
But then you go over to someplace like LinkedIn and LinkedIn is where you have Bob Jordan engaging with people via video chat and Andrew Watterson, the same thing. You have a lot of Wall Street, buy side, sell side, investor type individuals that do their social media via LinkedIn and it also goes all the way up to government affairs. You have people that work in the offices of legislators that look at content on LinkedIn and we can direct content towards each of these channels given the audience that lives there and consumes there. So, part of our strategic plan going forward is to make sure that the right message lands in front of the right people on the right channel.
Kurt Heidemann:
I'd like to just make a public service announcement. You mentioned the 5,000 pilots on the Contract 2020 Facebook, that is not an official SWAPA account. Just to-
Mike Panebianco:
Nope.
Kurt Heidemann:
... make that clear.
Mike Panebianco:
Yeah, that is not a SWAPA account. Actually, our own Facebook page has a lot of engagement. It's skyrocketed over the last month or so with the amount of content that's gone in there and there's actually some engagement back and forth. Interestingly enough, there are a lot of different types of people engaging on our Facebook page which is good to see.
Amy Robinson:
You did say this earlier but I want to go back and reiterate this. What you were talking about when you said building the network, what is something that you're asking? You said you've asked them to engage on social media, but let's say for our pilots who are not interested in doing that at all, what can they do and where can they engage and become more active?
Mike Panebianco:
Well, that's a great question too. And we always want to see pilots talking to pilots about meaningful, factually correct things. We all want this contract, everybody wants to get to the end goal of living under a better contract. And so, the time we spend in the jetway switching airplanes, the time that we spend at a hotel, on the shuttle, if we're having or listening to others engaging on the issues that we're facing in our contract effort, we want pilots to be informed and you can get that from swapa.org.
We have a lot of resources, we're going to be putting out a lot of content, not to try to beat somebody into our way of thinking, but to share factual information. And if you're not on social media, that's fine, we'd love to have you there and help have you help and share but you have so many other touchpoints during the day that you can engage other pilots and be a positive representation of what we're trying to achieve with the contract effort.
Kurt Heidemann:
Yeah, I'd like to point out the work email we started a few months back, that's a good data point that really has no slant to it, it's just these are the facts. That's the kind of information I think that we've had some success with recently.
Mike Panebianco:
I agree. I think sometimes rhetoric hurts us more than it helps us. When we get angry and we want to drive emotion into our messaging, I think sometimes that can backfire on us because it's a big, wide diverse pilot group and we need everybody moving forward. The strike authorization vote is out there, the genie is out of the bottle and I'd rather pilots make a good data driven decision on saying yes because that will bring us to where we want to be and to share solid arguments that are based on data so that we have high ground with our audiences, all of our audiences, when we stay factual and we don't get overly emotional and drive people not to want to join with us.
Amy Robinson:
What would you say to someone who is your typical I'm a pilot that I just want to fly and I want to go home? What would you say to encourage them to become more active either with the union or even through the SAV vote?
Mike Panebianco:
I think this contract touches all of us in a different way. For those of us that are maybe a little bit older or have had a lot of health issues, I think the big driver for us is the medical and benefits side of the contract and maybe some of the retirement because, a lot of us, we didn't hit the stock grants, we didn't have the high matching for retirement. So, everyone will find what they're looking for in the contract, everyone's life will be improved when Contract 2020 comes in as high as we can push it.
That being said, to inspire activism from each pilot, you're not here to beat the company over the head with a shovel, you're not here to do negative damage to our company by involving yourself, you are helping the guy sitting next to you. Even if your life is perfect and you are happy with the amount of money that you make, what would the success of Contract 2020 be for you? If you're happy with what you make and you're more than satisfied with the level of pay and your benefits and everything like that, think of somebody else, think of the pilots.
We had two pilots alone that I've just talked to recently that have been having a hard time getting chemotherapy drugs covered for their cancer treatments. Would you help that pilot? We have pilots who have family members who have had mental and emotional health issues and the financial outlay for our pilots has been great. Help that pilot. You have pilots that have gone through horrific life events over the time that they've been here, help that pilot. How about the pilots that are continuously ... Some of you seem to have an unlucky bell over your head and it gets rung all the time by scheduling, how many days off have some of you lost? Maybe you haven't been JAed or rerouted but a lot of pilots have, help that pilot. If you don't need it for yourself, help the guy sitting next to you, help the girl sitting next to you, help their family.
That's my appeal to you as the comm chair to help our negotiating committee get this thing done. Please vote yes. Vote yes for the person sitting next to you.
Kurt Heidemann:
Mike, going back a couple of minutes, you mentioned one of the things with social media was that you were targeting various audiences with different channels. That isn't just for social media, that's really in all of our comm, isn't it? How do we address different audiences or multiple audiences in our comm and what does that mean to our pilots?
Amy Robinson:
And taking a step further than that, Kurt, I think sometimes there's a little bit of misconception of we're heard here but not there or that kind of thing. So, I think that's another really good-
Kurt Heidemann:
That's fair, too.
Amy Robinson:
... point for you to address for our entire membership as well as their families and how the media plays into that, et cetera.
Mike Panebianco:
So, you dive a little bit deeper into the marketing world when you talk about landing your message where it counts and the audience that holds the keys to our contract is your investors, your Southwest Airlines board members, the executives and the people who influence them, who talk to them. And we want to bring pressure to the people who can say yes and put that value on the table. So, Kurt's on this podcast, I want Kurt to walk in and see the guy across the table from him fatigued because everyone's bombarding him and saying, "You need to get this done because it's getting a little warm in my pool." So, how does that work? So, there's a thing called geofencing and our membership may not see all this and that's why I want to explain it.
So, geofencing is the act of putting a geographical fence around a location, an area where a person engages a company. Let's just take for example a board member at Southwest Airlines works for company X and, around company X, we can draw a line of five miles, 10 miles or whatever and we can drop ads into that space. So, anyone who turns on their phone, if you engage on anything in electronic media that remotely touches a Google ad or something like that, that'll drop in that geographical area. So, if we said, "Hey, everybody, this is so-and-so the CEO of brand X and they're a Southwest Airlines board member," everyone in that area is going to get that ad. We're going to have that placed so that those companies, people sitting down in their break room at company X open their phone up and start surfing Facebook and, all of a sudden, here's an ad and it's got a picket sign, swap a picket sign.
And man, they talk to their supervisor and, next thing you know, CEO at brand X is going, "Hey, why are there ads dropping on my people that show me as a board member of Southwest Airlines?" That's how technical you can get with ad buys and those are things that the membership may not see because, if you're not in that geographical area, you may not have that come across your social but there's things that we will share with you and you drop in. And we are targeting people who make a difference, people who can influence us getting our deal done and that's just one way. Add strategic ad buys, strategic hashtags, putting messaging in front of people who talk to Bob Jordan, who talk to Andrew Watterson, who influence the board of directors and our investors. So, that's how technical we can get.
Amy Robinson:
I think one thing that's important too is, our membership, they may not see all of those things
Mike Panebianco:
Correct. They may not see it but it's happening. The things that you'll see are the direct engagement requests that SWAPA will give you. The things you don't see that are happening while you sleep, that is that strategic ad buy and we have a social media expert that has done this for years with a very, very large company. We have a comm department that's putting together ads that are set to escalate the message and bring more pressure as we need it. We can throttle those messages and get them in front of the right people.
Kurt Heidemann:
Mike, you were talking about the different avenues a few minutes ago of social media and how you have different channels for different audiences but then we do have comm that we put out broadly, more broadly, and that does often have multiple audiences. Talk to the listeners a little bit about how that impacts how we present information and when and to whom.
Mike Panebianco:
Sure. Good examples are, any update on our contract effort, that goes out to our pilot group but what many pilots don't understand is that it also goes out to the mediator. It goes out and it gets grabbed by the press, it gets grabbed by management, there's a very broad audience to almost everything that we put out and sometimes we're very intentional about where we put things and sometimes we have to broadcast to a very, very wide audience and their level of understanding. And sometimes pilots are looking at things that SWAPA might put out as lacking a little bit of edge and maybe a little bit more nuanced and what I'd encourage our membership to understand is that sometimes it's not for you directly. It is for you but it's for a broader audience because there are a lot of sets of eyes that look at everything that we put out. And unless we specifically make it password protected, it's out there. So, what we put out, it's not always intuitive to our pilot group that this is for a bigger audience but it is.
Kurt Heidemann:
And I'd like to point out too that I think we do a pretty good job of speaking pilot as often as we do. So, I think there is a bit of authenticity in there that sometimes lacks when other people write about what we do and how we do it.
Mike Panebianco:
I agree. I think aviation reporters are very, very good at picking up on speaking pilot. The local reporters, we'd love to educate them some more but I think there's a balance that we have to strike with everything we put out and we do a pretty good job of that.
Amy Robinson:
And I would even argue that some of our messaging is even to Wall Street investors and that messaging is even a little bit different than the messaging that we put out that is public.
Mike Panebianco:
Yep. Buy side and sell side Wall Street, they don't always speak the same language either. Even up to government affairs, between advisors to the president, all the way down through the transportation subcommittees, they may be hearing things just a little bit different and they may receive things that we say a little bit differently. So, we have a broad audience to consider on everything that we put out.
Amy Robinson:
So, Mike, one thing I think people may not know is that you've actually been around for quite a while at SWAPA and with Southwest Airlines. Can you give everybody a background or let them know what your history, past has been?
Mike Panebianco:
Sure. My work at SWAPA has largely been behind the scenes. I'm more of a guy who likes to get down in the trenches and get work done than to be out front and have been blessed to be left out of the front for most of my time here. But I was hired at Southwest in September of 2000 and upgraded in 2007. 2014 was an interesting year, we were in year two of negotiations, we were heading into a year three, we had gone to mediation and that was the point where you sit and you ask yourself where can I do the most good because I really don't feel like I had done much in my time at Southwest and I was looking for something to sink myself into that would help our pilots. I do like to write, I did engage on the forum quite a bit in my earlier years here so I ran
I ran for Baltimore domicile rep, became the vice chair in Baltimore. Six months later into 2015, our vice president, sitting vice president had resigned and the board had made me the vice president pro temp and then ran for office that fall and became the vice president. I served two terms, termed out at the end of 2019 and moved to the contract admin committee because one of the things that I had spent most of my time as a vice president doing was helping pilots that were facing disciplinary issues. And so, I spent three years doing that on the contract admin committee. I do a little bit of consulting outside work with small businesses that are growing and I love strategic messaging. You'll see I'm a little bit more into the social media side of things and that's my role here in comm as well is looking at social media and messaging.
But yeah, it brings us up to today and this is the fight of a lifetime. I think it's a generational contract, I think it's pivotal and it's something that I'm very much excited to be a part of to help our committee and help our union secure that contract for our membership.
Kurt Heidemann:
Mike, this is the one thing that I think is fascinating. In your story, you were a newly elected Baltimore rep, six months later, you're VP and then, before too long, you actually served as the temporary president. So, it was like a movie. How did that happen exactly?
Mike Panebianco:
It's one of those chapters that, if you've ever seen me, you know I have a face for radio and then I have a voice for the written word and I think that six month period of my life in 2015 is the reason for it. I had hair before that but now I do not. But yeah, so stepping into union work, it was new. It was new for me and I viewed it like a business like all the other things that I'd been working on outside of Southwest. A small business, grew up on a family business and looking at it from that mindset. And as we moved into 2015 and things started falling apart with TA1 and this is only the second time that we ever voted no for a contract in my tenure here anyway. 2008, '09, I think, was TA1, TA2 and then, here again in 2015, we had an incredible opportunity to rebuild SWAPA.
And we went through a lot, the membership went through a lot but we asked for trust, we asked for the opportunity to turn maybe a bad deal into a good deal. And going from a vice chair learning how a board meeting worked and how to represent a pilot in a disciplinary hearing to, oh, my God, we could face a decertification. We faced a special election for a new president going all the way through the executive channels and ended up being a temporary president for two months while we stood up an election. That was a lot, it was a lot.
Kurt Heidemann:
So, Mike, with your background, having been hired back in 2000, you started working for Herb and you've been through Jim Parker's term and then all the way through Gary Kelly's. Take us back in time a little bit and walk us through some of those changes. I know we don't have time to cover all of them but what's your perspective on the evolution of Southwest in that period?
Mike Panebianco:
Well, I thought it was a dream to be a kid from a family business to get hired at a place like Southwest. It was a conscious choice. I had a Continental number, I was at Continental Express, I could have gone across to Continental and stayed there and chose to leave to come to Southwest to basically do the same kind of flying with a bigger airplane that I was doing as a commuter pilot. And some people say you're nuts and pun intended, I guess, yeah, it was great. Meeting him, having breakfast with Herb and seeing him several times throughout my early years at the airline. Little bit of a pivot when Jim Parker came in and you see him lock horns with the flight attendants and that was the first real exposure to discord at Southwest that I had. Although there was a little bit of it going on when I was a new guy and weeks as first term and that contract negotiation that went on back then but, still, you felt really good about it.
And then Jim Parker came in in '03, '04, in that era, and you saw him lock horns with the flight attendants and it led to him being very short term as a CEO and then here comes Gary Kelly. And the one thing I think was most impactful about those years was right about the time I upgraded in '07. Chuck Magill was the first chief pilot that rose to VP of flight ops in my time here and ended up getting in the middle of negotiations and I think that was where I saw the first tilting of our culture becoming a little more business-like, a little more numbers or money driven and seeing the culture become a commodity that they were trading in. And I don't know if that's the right way to say it, maybe they were monetizing or even weaponizing the culture a little bit because things started to change.
And I can tell you, the first day I saw it was when a very senior four-digit captain had a blow up at the gate in St. Louis over internal customer service issues. And that led to him retiring and it was an eye-opening experience in my world and embodied the shift that we had made from taking care of our employees and then them taking care of our customers and then the profits taking care of our investors. That was the very first big blow up that I saw. And as we move through Gary Kelly's years as CEO, they had that scoreboard in the pilot's lounge talking about ROIC. And if we get to be this big, if we get this much in ROIC, then we're going to, return on invested capital, then we're going to grow.
And it's almost like they kept moving the goal line or moving the goal posts and we could never quite achieve what we needed to get unstale and unstuck or grow in the way that we were promised and that just continued while we were very confident in our company because, economically, we were doing very, very well. I think the culture has been on a downward slide for at least a decade, maybe more, and watching Bob Jordan come in on the coattails of Gary Kelly, I think, is somewhat positive but show me, don't tell me because we've been hearing it for a long, long time.
And where I sit now, about 23 years into my time at Southwest, we're waiting for some action. I'd like to see something happen rather than just talk about it and that's what the hope is, I think, for Bob Jordan. He's a year in, haven't seen much.
Amy Robinson:
So, you're speaking of the culture at Southwest Airlines. Talk a little bit about some of the concerns you have that could hurt the efforts that SWAPA has in getting a contract that's worthy of these pilots.
Mike Panebianco:
Well, I think the first thing that will hurt us is making enemies where we don't need them and we don't need our fellow employees angry with us, we don't need to agitate them and drag them into our deal. I don't think it's very useful. I see a lot of things go on social media, ticking other people off and getting SWAPA saddled with representations and employee relations investigations or things, that's something we don't need to do. That's unforced errors, that's unforced cost for us to run. Representation on a chief pilot meeting or an ER meeting is thousands of dollars out of our pockets and we should not do that and it doesn't help us to have enemies where we don't need them. I think the biggest thing we can do is remember who we were before we got hired.
We were hired based on a model and I don't care if you came from the acquisition of AirTran, I don't care if you were a dyed in the wool Herb Davidian. Someone could accuse me of that from my early years. We were all brought into this company, most of us were brought into this company based on a profile of values and performance and potential and that made us a very positive workforce. It made it easy for them to turn that culture into something monetizable and it is monetizable because they put a heart on the jet. It's a brand, it's what they want people to believe about our airline. And right now, I think what I want our pilots to remember is we were professional aviators before we got here. Aviation has an amazing and deeper culture than Southwest will ever have and I want you to remember that.
And it really just smacked me at Oshkosh this year to see just hundreds of thousands of people gathering around their love for flying airplanes. And that, in combination with our pilot group being generous, being kind, being uplifting and going beyond all the time, we have more examples of pilots going beyond than I ever had examples of us having a bad moment, remember that and build on that. We can always have that and that's not something that rides on the Southwest culture wave. If they get their thing together and the Southwest culture recovers, that's great, that's just gravy. But for us, I think most importantly, we need to keep ours moving forward and building as well.
Amy Robinson:
So, you talked a lot about being engaged and staying engaged, Mike. What would you say to our membership? What is the thing you would tell them most about being and staying engaged?
Mike Panebianco:
I think the most important thing is to make sure that we're connected, that we're able to communicate. And if you're talking with the other pilots that you're flying with, the people you run into, ask them, "Are you receiving SWAPA's emails?" And if you're not, send us an email at [email protected] and we'll hook you back up. The second thing is be a good ambassador. Be a positive, don't be a negative. Don't bully people into agreeing with us, that's not going to help us in the long run. We want everybody on board of their own free will and ambitiously intrinsically participating. And the third thing is know what you're talking about. Get into these podcasts, go back and listen to the NC podcasts. Get into the RLA education and resources page inside swapa.org. Know what is there and share.
We're going to make it easier for you to share, we've got a couple of tools that we're putting together right now that are going to be out in the coming weeks that'll make it really easy for you to share where those resources are and just stay engaged. If you haven't heard from us in a few weeks, look in your junk drawer and make sure that we're not getting filtered out by your spam filter. That is my big ask of our pilots.
Kurt Heidemann:
Our thanks to Mike for taking the time to talk to us today and bringing our listeners up to speed on SWAPA's comm and our efforts in 2023 and beyond.
Amy Robinson:
Please remember, if you have any feedback for us at all or any ideas of any subject matter experts or people you'd like to hear from, please drop us a line at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.
Kurt Heidemann:
And finally, today's bonus number is 84. That's the number of days until the strike authorization vote opens on May 1st. As Mike said, please take the time to make sure your contact information is up-to-date and be ready to help us spread our message.