Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded
cnn.com
cnn.com
https://twitter.com/AtSouthwest/status/1606543397996855296
If true, it could account for a majority of SW's cancellations over the past few days and it could continue for the foreseeable future.
That memo appears to be issued as a result of all the flight problems. And it says it's a temporary emergency policy due to the current trouble they are having.
I don’t remember if the North American winter storms started before December 21, on that day, or after.
IANAL but that’s not just unreasonable, it’s downright illegal according to Colorado labor laws. Southwest can only ask their employees for a doctor’s note after four consecutive days of absence and that’s according to a post-COVID law.
I’m not sure about the mandatory overtime but that’s probably governed by a union contract (4/5ths of SW is unionized). Evidence shows that this ~moron~ VP didn’t know the specifics of the former so he probably fucked up the latter too.
I’m guessing Denver employees aren’t the only ones to walk out. Union solidarity, baby!
Interesting, that's the first time I hear of a US law being better for employee protection than here in Germany. Do they have limited sick days? That could explain it, as they are obviously unlimited here, but doctor's notes are commonly required after 0-1 days.
You can't compare US Federal law to German Federal law (in these cases), as the Federal government is significantly and substantively hands off to labor concerns (beyond the bare minimum). You would have to compare specific state statutes to Bundesrat+Bundesland statutes.
Here is an expanded version of your quote that highlights the assumption.
Kinda like I think of apple being a US company, even as it’s probably Californian, and even private.
In my opinion (I am not attempting to state facts), the semantics of what is a “US law” and what is an “EU law” differ, because the US is a nation and the EU is not.
Therefore it’s my opinion that in order for something to be a “US law”, it’s enough that it’s a law anywhere in the US. I think laws differing across the US is already implied which is why care is taken to label something a “federal” law or crime when it does not.
In the EU however, any law that semantically fits into what could be called an “EU law” is a top-down mandate due to the fact that the EU is not a nation but a group of nations, so calling for example a law that exclusively exists in Poland an “EU law” becomes nonsensical when it didn’t even originate from the EU organization. The US is (at least not primarily) just an “organization of states” regardless what one might want to believe from reading the constitution. It’s very much a monolithic nation state in a way that the EU is not and possibly never will be.
Under the concept of dual sovereignty in a federal system (such as the United States, Russia, Canada, or India), conduct can be legal or illegal under each of the sovereigns independently. At least post-Lochner era there are many laws that are in this scope.
An example that might test your definition would be recreational use of marijuana which is legal in some states but illegal federally. It would be at best misleading to say that "US law permits the recreational use of marijuana" even though it meets your definition.
Take a liberal state like California or New York and the "surpass" count would be much higher (as in this case, this specific example "surpassing" Germany), especially in regards to labor and tenant protections. Take a state like Mississippi and there are very few EU nations it would "surpass". The counter being to the OP's assumption that the EU, in general, is "more liberal than the US"; ergo it's crazy that there's a state that's actually more protective.
Labor laws in Texas have no effect on the 12% of the population that lives in California. So it's disingenuous to compare these laws, something the Federal government specifically doesn't have much say over (due to the enumerated powers clause of the US' limited Federation), to a random nation. The only proper methodology is to compare the scope of where those laws are set. In this specific example, those contexts are: the State level, in the US; a mixture of Bundesrat and Bundesland legislation in Germany.
I never even mentioned the EU assembly or EU laws. It would seem you're creating a straw man to "win" an internet argument or reinforce your own worldview.
Actually, I'd just not take that job.
Besides: Doing that knowingly and intentionally would likely qualify as assault (besides being a morally shitty thing to do).
US Laws = European common sense. You did stick us with the protestants after all :-)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
The emergency procedures were likely put in place due to crew resourcing issues that were fallout from the storms. These procedures require more stringent review of sick requests to ensure all hands are on deck and are probably allowed by negotiated union contracts.
I'm skeptical of this walkout rumor.
> If you've been left in the lurch and your efforts to reach a customer service agent are going nowhere, the founder of Scott's Cheap Flights suggests trying an international number.
> "The main hotline for US airlines will be clogged with other passengers getting rebooked. To get through to an agent quickly, call any one of the airline's dozens of international offices" Scott Keyes said.
> "Agents can handle your reservation just like US-based ones can, but there's virtually no wait to get through."
When landing at an airport when you know several connections are lost due to local issue with your airline, always get on the phone as soon as you get out of the aircraft. certainly call before heading to the kiosk and lining up for the lone agent to support you
Because, by the time the sole agent gets to listen to your issue, the next flight will be fully booked, and your hopes of getting out quickly will be gone.
We had this on 25 December, our flight to London was cancelled. Automatically rebooked to our destination later that day, but our party (2 adults, 3 kids) was split up across two separate flights several hours apart.
Of course I had already phoned in even before we got the rebooking. email, airline phone agent said that's what they have, both of those flights now full so no chance of getting us all together. Asked about other departure points, told no.
Queued at ticketing desk for 45 mins, asked to be reunited on flight to the same destination but from a different departure airport, 2h away, agent did it immediately, checked us in and handed over the new boarding passes.
Don't underestimate just how much changes when the tickets move to airport control at T-24h
I've not had the pleasure of WN, but have used several European LCCs. There are some situations where good travel insurance is possibly the only thing you can rely on.
Fix your own alternative travel (believe me, having been disrupted on Christmas Day this is sometimes easier said than done), demand a refund from your original carrier, and claim everything back from your insurer.
(From another HN posting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34145303)
That's damning.
The situation is kind of amplified by the fact that they are now doing crew scheduling by hand -- their crew scheduling system went offline at some point during this fiasco -- and because they aren't a hub and spoke style of airline, they don't have flight attendants at their hubs...so, what's happening is that flight attendants are scheduled for a "leg" of a trip, from Altoona to Boston to Columbus to Dallas to Edison. This flight attendant will be on that plane from Altoona until they wrap up in Edison. Because of this interruption, they cancel the flight from Altoona to Boston. Now, they need to find a plane (and a crew) in Boston to fly the leg from Boston to Columbus...cascading failures throughout their system. Add in phone system failures, a winter storm, and the busiest travel week of the year, and you've got what Southwest has right now.
You have crew timing out, crews that are abandoned at stations, and some folks telling people to not expect their luggage for 30+ days. Southwest has also been delaying negotiating with their ground crew (it's been three+ years since they've had a contract), so, I'm almost certain that when they got the Denver "Operational Emergency" email on the 21st, most of them said screw it and quit: every other airline has struggled to hire experienced folks and my guess is that it won't be long until they're re-employed somewhere else
They've cancelled most flights until Friday, with the exception being flight for aircraft staging, and will struggle to find open seats for their flight attendants to ride on other airlines (even if they are flying space-positive) just so they can have crew at locations for flights.
Since WN operates a linear modal across the US, they have to essentially reset the entire network state to get flights back to normal. Hence cancelling 2/3 of flights for the remainder of the week.
Even if it’s out of their control (many of the issues were within their control), it seems Southwest fails way worse than every other US airline.
Isn't this just normal for all American customer-service people? I guess it's relative though.
I happens quite frequently, but unless you follow airline news, or you were personally impacted you would not necessarily know.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2021/10/2...
Regional carriers typically operate smaller aircraft with less senior crew and sorta serve to expand the mainline carriers markets and also often serve to feed the mainline carriers experienced pilots for their mainline aircraft.
Even during COVID?
Post COVID you have everyone and their mom trying to make up for 2 years of missed vacations and being stuck at home. And they're angry as hell - the post COVID population seems wreckless and short fused, for reasons I don't exactly know.
A few months ago, they monkeyed with our departure time, and we correctly concluded that it would end up missing the connecting flight. The booking agent couldn't give us anything but time-bomb vouchers, but I got cash by emailing customer support. I used the federal wording for "elected not to travel" and "substantially different itinerary," which may have helped me not have any issues.
Recently, I was glad I used the right card to book an airbnb which we had to cancel day of check-in. Full refund on a non-refundable airbnb.
But my story isn't bad. Hearing other people's story at the airport in line was shocking. Family with kids stuck in connections for days. No hotels, little food, crowded lines. Bags? Somewhere in the country.
My brother had a flight canceled on southwest Thursday night. It was completely impossible to rebook or even cancel on their website at that point. The phone and physical lines were impossible, so we just booked a new flight for the following day in order to get him home for Christmas, it wasn’t even much more than his original flight. The next day his original reservation was “automatically rebooked” on a flight for Christmas morning. He kept the new booking and didn’t cancel the rebooked leg till he was wheels up. Craziest thing was the flight wasn’t full. He got an entire row to himself.
The fact that southwest doesn’t seem to have the ability to let customers self rebook in situations like this seems to be a major IT/software failing.
But when things go wrong en masse, error propagates through the system fast. It’s the same failure mode as just-in-time manufacturing. There just aren’t gaps in the schedule for lots of things to go wrong, nor extra planes to pick up the slack. I’d recommend Southwest still, but not if your schedule is tight and the flight is can’t-miss.
I suspect there are some other problems in their tech stack and personnel they have to sort out too.
Southwest is going to need to go above and beyond to fix this or they're done in my book. I will choose a more expensive option over them. I'll choose a less direct route. This Russian Roulette but every chamber's loaded game has been an enormous, stressful waste of time.
None of the hacks suggested here work when the customer service phone line is down, the website doesn't work, and every other flight is cancelled or full.
What would it take for southwest to remedy the station for you?
I know it's hard to say. You may never get your bags.
I'm basically valuing any future southwest credit as $0. All of my air miles at $0 too :(
I think I'd want the following:
All my property restored as it was (whether physically or through paying for replacement costs). Full reimbursement for replacement flights, clothes, rental cars, gas, food, and other expenses incurred due to their negligence. Some kind of additional multiplier on top of that as an apology for the stress inflicted.
On my American flight tonight I added up just the total I've paid to fix Southwest's screwup, and it's already almost $1k before my luggage and not counting the refunded cost of my trip. My baggage foolishly contained at least one article of clothing which is genuinely irreplaceable. I don't know how I'd calculate the cost of that.
So we're looking at two or three grand of compensation before I ever even consider being a customer again.
I'm probably not worth it.
This year, I've had a perfect record: 3 air trips, and my luggage got lost on all 3. And yet every single bag got delivered eventually.
If you think about it, it's a matter of geometry: Airports don't have infinite storage space, so much as they'd like to lose luggage permanently, airlines have to deliver it to customers to make room for new lost luggage. And as bad as most carriers are, they wont resort to outright wanton destruction of luggage.
Fortunately I'm not flying this week, but I've already seen and experienced numerous meltdowns from SWA in the past. If this doesn't signal a wake-up call to invest in tech infrastructure for any company I don't know what else will.
Extending use cases to cover behaviours that were not covered by the original software is where things get exciting. You will end up with a hodge podge of systems & processes that try to implement multi-step work flows and deal with failures through manual or equally complex automated methods to compensate.
Generally most industries are pretty terrible at evolving the solutions they have or completely replacing them. So you will see a multi-generational set of systems that are in place to provide an acceptably current set of behaviours.
This situation can arise due to varying commercial pressures, however Developer and Engineer's inability to communicate what the system currently does and what is easy and hard to change in no small way contributes to following paths that result in poor system outcomes over the lifetimeof systems.