Just Like Ryanair
Seeing as FR is modelled on SWA I suppose we'll be seeing articles like this in a few years then regards Ryanair staff too eh?
Hope so.
Airline's first workers ride it to millionaire status
By Jeff Bailey The New York Times
MONDAY, MAY 15, 2006
DALLAS
To earn his pay, Mike Mitchel, 56, collects boarding passes and helps passengers onto airplanes. He lives with his mother, takes a yearly vacation to Las Vegas when the room rates are lowest and counts movies and music CDs as extravagances.
"I like to save," Mitchel said. "I'll pick up a penny."
Mitchel, though, could readily afford to walk past any dropped change. As one of the 17 remaining active employees who helped start Southwest Airlines 35 years ago, he is rich. A beneficiary of Southwest's profit-sharing program - like all the airline's regular employees - he owns about 50,000 shares of Southwest stock, valued at roughly $800,000. And that's just a quarter of a portfolio that easily makes Mitchel a multimillionaire.
"I could retire tomorrow," he said.
Few long-tenured workers in the airline industry have that option, given that the pensions and wages of most have been sharply reduced in recent years in bankruptcies and other cutbacks.
But for Mitchel and his Southwest colleagues from the first days - eight flight attendants, five operations workers and four executives, each a millionaire - it's not about the money. Ask them why they stick around, and they mention frugality or pride in earning their keep. And they say they simply like to work.
That's not all. Bound together by Southwest's initial struggle to survive, they are reluctant to end careers that for many of the 17 have defined their lives.
"My friends who left early at Southwest regret it so much," said Deborah Stembridge, who began as a flight attendant when the airline was just getting off the ground.
Accustomed only to success, it is as if they do not want to miss out on the rest of the story. They helped Southwest send big-name airlines like Pan Am and Eastern to the junk heap, and more recently helped bring United and Delta to their knees. Sure, it is hard work. But, they wonder, what might be next?
"This place has pushed employees to the breaking point," said Dan Johnson, 55, who started in 1971 as a ramp worker and now works in air traffic control. "It's part of why we're successful."
The original workers joined what at the time seemed a long-shot business proposition.
Sandra Force, an elementary school teacher and one-time beauty pageant winner from Memphis, was floating on a raft in the swimming pool of her Dallas apartment building one summer day in 1971, she said, hoping to attract the attention of a fellow tenant.
Rather than ask her out, however, he told her that a new local airline was hiring flight attendants. "And you wear hot pants," he told her.
"I got up off my raft, dried off and went into my apartment and called Southwest," Force said. "They said, 'Please wear a dress,' because they wanted to see my legs." She was hired on the spot.
"My mother was devastated: 'Sandra, if you were going to quit your teaching job, why didn't you go with a well- known airline like Braniff?"' Braniff, which competed directly with Southwest in Texas, later failed.
Along with her fellow flight attendants, clad in orange hot pants and white vinyl go-go boots to attract attention to the new airline, Force initially flew flights linking Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.
"One time I did 12 trips back and forth to Houston in one day," she said. "My feet were killing me."
When Southwest's zany service and skimpy flight attendant outfits drew national attention, Force ended up on the February 1974 cover of Esquire magazine, a not altogether happy experience for a graduate of a Baptist college. The photo made her appear shapelier than she was.
"They airbrushed," she said. "They didn't tell me they were going to do that."
But it fitted Southwest's image. "We were selling sex," Southwest's current president and one of the original 17, Colleen Barrett, said of the early years.
Southwest has always taken an underdog attitude. And early on, at least, the company actually was an underdog. It took four years from incorporation to the airline's first flight in 1971, largely because other airlines sued to prevent Southwest from operating.
Southwest's scrappy lawyer at the time, Herb Kelleher, is now its chairman. Perhaps one of his greatest accomplishments was to keep Southwest workers thinking like underdogs - despite the fact that the company essentially dictates fares to the rest of the industry and has a stock market value nearly as big as that of all other U.S. airlines combined.
Descending a staircase in the lobby of Southwest's plain headquarters here, trailing smoke from a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, Kelleher, 75, called out to the original employees, assembled for an anniversary photograph: "I told you you'd never last."
Though Southwest has just about the lowest costs in the industry, it now pays the highest wages to many worker groups, making up the difference with higher productivity. Its planes fly longer hours and sit at the gate for fewer minutes.
The most senior flight attendants can make more than $100,000 a year if they want, by working charter flights that pay double time. By comparison, United Airlines' top international flight attendants are paid at best about $50,000, according to their union, after some big wage givebacks during the carrier's bankruptcy.
Unlike older airlines, Southwest never had a pension plan but rather started a profit-sharing plan, much of it paid in Southwest stock in the early years. Shares purchased for $10,000 in 1972 would be valued at about $12.6 million today.
Last year, Southwest paid $142 million into profit-sharing accounts, or 7.5 percent of each worker's salary. But that was down substantially from $180 million, or 16.2 percent of salary, paid out in 2000, when profit was higher and salaries were much lower.
With such a stake in the airline's success, Linda Pinka, one of the eight remaining original flight attendants, said, "You have a tendency to work a little harder."