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."

Well....

I am happy that the people in the article have hit gold. But lets face it, they are only a few lucky ones and most of the staff need to work very very hard to make a living.

What the article doesn't tell you is how much they actually had to do to make a living. I mean 12 legs on a day, that is just inhumane, not to mention in violation of any work and rest regulation that I know of.

There are other things in life then becoming a millonair. If you have that much money and take once a year a cheap holiday to Las Vegas, well that may cut it for him, but sounds like no fun at all to me. I would rather have a bit less money and a bit more time to enjoy my little money with family and friends. But maybe that's just me.

Offcourse there is a big difference between work attitude in the US and Europe. It seems that we go more and more in their direction though with our cutting salary, no workers rights, sort it out yourself attitudes. Unless offcourse you are willing to work day and night and get the extra money bonus...

There is more to life then the collection of money and wealth!!!

I think SouthWest must be doing something right for their employees - their staff retention rate is legendary - that is phenomenally high right across the board.

Hmm, plus I hear they have really good union representation that actually works.

All sounds just like.....who??!!

I do not believe that Southwest was ever competitive with Pan Am on one single route.

The point is not about what routes Southwest and Pan Am competed on, or whether in the 1970s 12 sectors was inhumane, but that there is still a company in the aviation industry which treats its staff as important people, and its passengers too I believe (although I have never flown with them as a pax), and manages to be a success at the same time.
In Europe and the USA at the moment, all the other companies appear to be going in the opposite direction, and which side is correct remains to be seen. Personally I like the Southwest option.

XSB

To me there seems to be a massive cultural difference here.....

You look at any successful (and unsuccessful) large cooperation in the US today..and I don't just mean airlines either. There seems to be an acceptance that it is more cost effective to retain experienced and skilled employees, as they add value throughout the business cycle. This is also highlighted in certain American airlines where a team or family spirit is part of the culture. The old adage of look after your employees..they will look after your customers....who will look after the shareholders seems to ring true.

Compare this to Pikey Air....Cut everything to the bone....chop and change T & C's without consultation, and generally act like tyrants when it comes to employee's, and hey guess what? customer service at Pikey Air in my experience..is virtually non-existent.

There is more to life than collection of money and wealth.
 

Yes, there certainly is more to it. But you must have missed the part where he says he could retire tomorrow. This guy is working because he likes his job.

To go back to the opening comment of Sandman, and what I believe he was alluding to; the rather inaccurate comparison some airlines make between themselves and SWA.

I once went to a LoCo recruitment open day, about 2000 when the airline had +/- 20 a/c. It was filled with pilots of numerous nationalities and a vast spectrum of experience, i.e. many knew a thing or two about the business and had been around.

The chirpy lass who was the m.c. for the day started her brainwashed speech. Everything was SWA except the colour. Piffle, yet they still troll out the same; and they are not the only one. Imitation would be a form of flattery, but not the way it has been done. Cherry picking some of the business model is not the way it should be. Sadly, the aspect of the business model where the company saves costs by retaining crews, rather than retraining new crews, seems to have been lost on the bean counters. However, they will take their overstuffed bonus packets and do a runner, after a few years, to pastures new, leaving the career minded employees to mop up the poo they've left behind.

The joy of the English.
 

Jesus Tapdancing Christ, Rat, are you ever happy?

But RAT's right... and I'm sure there's a crossover point where the return from retention balances the extra cash outlay to enable it...

Hmm, clearly some history between LHC and RAT5 some of us don't know about.

Anyway, we've heard this before. Ryanair is not SWA, nor is easyjet or for that matter any other airline.

And whatever OLeary is (answers on a postcard) he certainly is not the much loved and larger than life Herb Kelleher.
Same taste in shirts but that's about it.

hey leo see you are in court again next week.Ill be there too,RIGHT BEHIND YOU!see you have the subpoenas out tommorrow.that must scare the repa boys and girls.

For anyone interested, there is no history between LHC and myself. God forbid! I certainly do not wish to open up a debate on that point.

LHC. Am I never happy? yes. I quit the rat race, as depicted by your employer and others alike, years ago. Still involved, but on my terms, and life has never been sweeeter. I just feel very sad & disheartened on behalf of those still locked into the ever disolving dream, and even more so for those with such closed eyes that they will not see.

There are lies. damned lies & statistics. Then again there are the utterances of.......................................................... .....almost any airline CEO you care to think of.

Can anyone, please, or not, give examples of any other high profile, enormous budget worldwide industry, which for decades had been in such f@#ck#d -up state. I can not think of any, even tanker shipping, which comes even close to aviation. So many major players going bust over the years; starting up again, going bust again, into Chapter 11, etc. etc. Such a massive turnover of expensive experienced senior staff members. I just wish, for once, the jokers at the top would stop and ask themselves a few pertinent questions and face the truth.

Apologies RAT5, must be LHC in another one of his cryptic moods.
Having seen his regular less than friendly pokes at certain contributors, I thought you might have been added to his list of favourites.

Anyway, interesting to hear your anecdote about that certain LOCO's recruitment day. Not surprised really. But how they continue to compare themselves to SWA is a complete mystery when you consider basic core facts like: staff retention rate, T's and C's and worker representation. Cherry picking indeed.