SLF but a labor guy. I thought the original article was remarkably clueless, as many of the commenters made clear.
At the end of the days, there is a strong moral hazard in allowing a group of employees to vote on the continuing employment of the people that set their wages.
I've never heard free speech described as "moral hazard" before. Unless the vote of no confidence had any binding effect on the employment of senior management (and I doubt that it did), it was nothing more than an expression of opinion by the bargaining unit. A negotiating tactic? No doubt. But I suspect that SWA management spent some considerable money on
PR firms to get articles like this one written - also a negotiating tactic. Whatever
PR firm found this guy found the perfect mark.
The real flaw in the writer's argument is the idea that the link between productivity and wages is somehow a moral imperative (the "tell" is the air of moral outrage). It's not. Of course productivity has something to do with the wages that an employer can pay. But I guarantee you that there are plenty of people who work at Southwest who produce no revenue but get paid decent salaries nonetheless - it's in the nature of any complex enterprise that not everyone contributes to the bottom line.
What determines compensation (within obvious limits) is bargaining power. If Southwest pilots have more bargaining power than 777 pilots at other airlines (which, of course, includes working for an enterprise that they've helped make profitable over the years), then good for them if they are able to leverage that into higher wages - although it's questionable whether that's really happening in this case.
The author also misunderstands the nature of what pilots do. Anyone can fly airplanes. Airline pilots are paid to keep passengers safe, which is a different (and far harder) job. It's like asking about the productivity of firefighters, or crews on SSBM submarines. How does one quantify the productivity of workers whose job it is to prevent bad things from happening?