Southwest Airlines' pilots may be laying the groundwork for a strike.
The Southwest Airlines Pilots Association has filed a request with the National Mediation Board to be officially released from mediation.
"Over the past three years of negotiations, we have made very little progress," says Casey Murray, SWAPA president.
The two sides entered into mediation in September of 2022.
The filing for release from mediation does not mean that a strike is imminent.
Murray says the ball is now in the board's court.
"They can grant a release, which sends us into a 30 day cooling off period," says Murray. "They can do nothing -- they can put us on ice -- or they can deny it and just ask us to continue negotiating."
Murray says the biggest sticking point in the talks relates to operational efficiency.
"Yes, there are IT problems," Murray says. "There are process problems, but it's the process problems and how they're connecting pilots to airplanes that's really driving a lot of (this) loss of control of the operation."
Those process problems, according to Murray, are what contributed in large part to the massive meltdown over the Christmas holiday last year that resulted in scores of cancelled flights and tens of thousands of stranded passengers.
"We've seen for about five years kind of a degradation in our efficiency and getting away from the core of how Southwest operates," says Murray, "and we've seen it manifest itself."
Late Thursday afternoon, Southwest issued a statement responding to the SWAPA's filing.
"We strongly disagree that we're at a point which justifies either party asking to be released from mediation," states Adam Carlisle, vice president of labor relations at Southwest. "We’ve continued meeting regularly with SWAPA and, in fact, made an industry-leading compensation proposal and scheduling adjustments to address workplace quality-of-life issues for our pilots. We feel confident that mediation will continue driving us even closer to a final agreement that will benefit both our Pilots and Southwest Airlines."
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