14 (Contract Admin Committee, David Kudish, Rob Odom, Dan O'Connor) Artwork

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14 (Contract Admin Committee, David Kudish, Rob Odom, Dan O'Connor)

November 10, 2025 • SWAPA

0:00 | 48:14

Today's SWAPA Number is 14. That's the number of outstanding grievances that are in process relating to contract interpretations. Defending our contract is one of the biggest pillars of what we do at SWAPA when Contract Admin is on the front line of that defense. Without a doubt, there are discussions or questions just about every hour of every day that we're having about this document and how it's impacting our quality of life.

So today we're sitting down with several folks from our Contract Administration committee. That would be committee chair Dave Kudish and committee members, Rob Odom and Dan O'Connor. From how we resolve these issues with the company to the best practices to make your life easier, this is an episode you can't afford to miss.

If you have any feedback for us at all, please drop us a line at comm@swapa.org or tap here to send us a text.

Tony Mulhare:

Matt McCants:

I'm Matt McCants.

Tony Mulhare:

And I'm Tony Mulhare. And here's our conversation with Dave, Rob, and Dan.

Matt McCants:

Well guys, I'm sure there's a number of topics that are top of mind to everyone listening out there when it comes to Contract Admin, but let's take a step back and if everyone can even remember, let's go back to January of '24 when this rewrite was ratified by the membership and now we have this completely new CBA that's live and on the playing field. And each of you have some different roles within the committee. So, in your own words, tell us what it was like getting this thing online and how things have progressed to now?

David Kudish:

Well, as the chairman, I wasn't the chairman when we actually first implemented it. I was just a committee member when we first got the new contract, so I picked up about six months into it. Our role was just to try to figure out processes to integrate the negotiating team into the Contract Admin team because everything was basically, "Hey, what did you guys mean here? What did you intend for this to be?" And so it was really, we always use that analogy of changing the tires on a car as you're rolling down the highway-

Matt McCants:

Sure.

David Kudish:

Because we really can never pull over. We can never stop. We're delivering the mail. The mail just keeps on coming. And so trying to get the staff up to speed to answer questions and develop these processes was just a really busy time. That was the only way to say it, it was tough.

Rob Odom:

I agree. I was a part-time member just prior to that. And then after ratification I came on as a full-time member. And a lot of that was like Dave said, efforts to learn all of the new language and how Contract Administration, enforcement of that new language married up with the joint implementation committee, which was part of the new contract transition period. And then how again, like Dave said, we would begin to educate the staff on those types of issues.

So it was a big learning curve, a lot of stuff there. Some stuff did carry over, but certainly a lot of new language in a rewrite that we had to get up to speed with because like he said, the train did not stop moving and we had to learn on the go.

Dan O'Connor:

One of the challenges for me, I've been a longtime contract administration committee member, and so during negotiations, Seth was the old chairman and Seth was a little bit more involved in negotiations. And so I was running things while he was attached to the negotiating committee at times. And so I very almost deliberately didn't pay a lot of attention to what was being negotiated because you really can't keep two contracts in your head. So I'm responsible for administering the old contract. So all of a sudden this thing goes live and it's like, okay, now I really don't know this language very well. I mean I have familiarity but I don't know it.

And the whole staff was in the same boat. Being responsible for administering the old contract. You reviewed things when you were asked to review language, but you didn't really know. You just couldn't be in those two worlds at the same time. And so it was really challenging to get everybody that's responsible for administering it up to speed like day one, you've got to be at full speed running, because we're flying the airplanes, we're doing these things every day. We have to be able to administer it.

Matt McCants:

Walk us through a little bit of how you guys break down the different specialties in the contract among you? And how the staff plays a role in what your committee does?

Dan O'Connor:

I was on the SRC, now the SAC, and I was involved in negotiations, but my focus was primarily scheduling items in the CBA. So I was brought over to Contract Admin to like Dave said, to do several things. One, to help with the implementation of the new contract and still involved in that, attend meetings to make sure everything that they're programming and implementing is contractually compliant. And then more importantly to help the committee and the staff with intent and the new language, how it's being applied across the different scheduling sections.

And then be there to answer questions for the staff. And they've come along very quickly. There are a lot of educational products put out that have helped. And also the staff has pretty good familiarity with the old CBA obviously. So learning the new ones was just to explain the differences-

Matt McCants:

Sure.

Dan O'Connor:

... and then explain different implementation timelines.

Matt McCants:

And Rob, what's your specialty on the committee?

Rob Odom:

I would say that I'm a generalist I guess you could call me. We have a contract that touches a lot of different areas from scheduling to benefits to grievances, investigations, et cetera. I assist the committee analyzing any sort of questions or issues that come up. And then in particular, I do assist if any of those issues rise to the level of more complicated or more specific disputes if they have to enter into the grievance process, I assist there.

I also assist the domicile representatives and members if they ever have to navigate the disciplinary and investigatory process.

Matt McCants:

So this is becoming abundantly clear, there's this transition period where we're administering the old contract, the new contract comes in, now everybody including the company is learning the rules of the road as it's live. This is a pretty tumultuous time period, especially at the beginning, but things start to smooth out. JIC has a process there that we're going to talk about in a little bit, that joint implementation committee. And Dan, you sit in a lot of those meetings. So do you Dave, so let's break this down even further and talk to the membership about what the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to month, what is this battle rhythm that Contract Administration is always in at all times? How does that look from the outside looking in?

David Kudish:

Yeah, it's one of the things we always say is we have to divide and conquer. There's so much to do that we have to, like we talked about, we have subject matter experts, we're all subject matter experts, but then we have sub-specialties. When a complicated scheduling question comes up, I'm more likely to turn to Dan to help to get through that. Rob's a good writer and so when it comes time to start working grievances, Rob will focus on that.

And then in terms of just, I probably am more of a generalist. I'm responsible for the product of the department, so I have to QA, we get a couple hundred emails a day and I have to review all of them. The basic battle rhythm is how a bill becomes a law is an issue will come into us either by a phone call or an email. And that process has changed. It's part of our employing this contract we had to make a lot of changes.

And one of them is the way the work is among the department. We have 12 staff members, 11 of them, we have a supervisor and then 11 people who are answering daily questions. Those are the people that get the emails. And they have a way that they distribute the work among them when an email or a call comes in and they handle that issue. Often it's just answering a question. Sometimes they can't answer the question right away and they have to send something over to the company.

And so that's the daily email exchange happens where we collate all the issues that came in. Some of them are just answered on the spot. Some of them need to be sent to the company. And so at the end of the day, we send an email to the different departments of the company, the payroll department, the scheduling department, the planning department, lead ops department. That's the daily exchange. Probably about 90% of the time we get the response back the next day or within a few days that says, "Yeah, we reviewed that. You're right. We fixed this. This pay issue is fixed, this scheduling issue fixed. Yes, we did that wrong. Here's what we'll do."

About 10% of the time they'll come back and the company department will have said, "No, we reviewed that and we think we did it correctly." And so that's really the first point where a manager, Lexi is our contract administration manager. So she would get involved there and she might take a look at it. And if she thinks, "You know what? We need to ask the committee." Now it gets to our level. So it gets elevated to the committee and then we'll take a look at it. Often we can make a decision right there, "Oh, you know what? The company's right, that issue's dead. The way they answered it. That makes sense." Sometimes we'll say, "No, I think there's a little bit more to that."

And that's where there's a decision tree there. Is this something that we can just answer internally and we'll just send it back to the company with another response? Is this something I have to have Dan or all of us or one of us go over to the SRC or the NC and say, "Hey, this issue came up." Because you can't write language for every circumstance. It's not possible. So there's always going to be these edge cases.

And the edge cases come to us and that's where we start with the interdepartmental cooperation. If we can't settle it at that point, then it gets added to our monthly issues meeting where we go to the company once a month and we sit down with labor at the company and they bring, they're supposed to bring the correct SMEs to that meeting where we get to have a discussion about it and try to solve it there.

Rob Odom:

Like Dave said, there's a decision tree. If it's specifically an implementation issue, a lot of times what we'll do is bring it to what we call a weekly alignment meeting. So I meet with a couple of the leadership of the SAC. Here is SWAPA we meet with the leadership over for scheduling over the company. And we'll try to handle it at that level and work out the issue there. If we can't handle it there, it'll usually get bumped up to the next level, which will be JIC. Like you said before, Matt, the Joint Implementation Committee. And Dave's involved in that too, and all the SMEs that were in the room for the negotiations go to the JIC every month to work out these issues focusing on implementation

David Kudish:

JIC, that venue has been a really, that's one of the benefits of the rewrite really, is that it's really difficult to get all of the people that negotiated the language in a room together. It's really difficult to get decision makers in a room. That's one of the challenges that we have is just getting a decision maker who's knowledgeable about the issue in the room. And JIC is a format we have now.

It's becoming less useful because all the low hanging fruit is already, it's gone, it's already been taken care of. But in the earlier days, JIC was really useful to be able to say, "Hey, everyone's sitting at this table. Six months ago you were in negotiations, you guys all know what you talked about." And we would settle issues there. We avoided a lot of grievances in that format.

Dan O'Connor:

I agree with Dave. I would say 90% are daily issues. Then they flow into the implementation committee or the issues meeting, and then from there, if we can't settle them from that point, they come back together to enter the grievance world at that point.

Matt McCants:

I think that brings up a great common misperception amongst pilots that when I email or call and I have an issue, a lot of us think that's immediately a grievance. And that's not the case. So we go through this process to try to resolve it, which is what we really want. We want a resolution. We aren't able to get a resolution at these other meetings. Then what happens?

David Kudish:

So if we have not been able to resolve it through all of the daily exchanges and the meetings, then we have a decision to make. And that's part of what my job is to know what are the right levers to pull? How can we best address this problem? Because sometimes you get problems that up to this point we've been mostly in the labor and scheduling world and they have their own way of viewing things. Some of these problems, I need another pilot to look at it.

And so I have to know, maybe I'll take something to Jody. And so Jody has other levers he can pull. Jody's got direct lines to vice president of flight ops and hire. And so Justin Jones at the company doesn't get a lot higher than that. And Jody can pick up the phone and he'll answer it. So sometimes it's like, "Hey Jody," and I can explain it to Jody and he can make a call and get it fixed. So it doesn't automatically become agreements, it just means that, "Hey, what we're doing so far is not working. Let's see if we can try something else."

We really, both parties have a responsibility to avoid grievances as best we can. We're supposed to solve issues at the lowest level possible and we take that seriously. So when we get to the roadblock where we just say, "Hey, we're just not going to settle this," and it does happen, then we write up the grievance and we file it.

Dan O'Connor:

And there's a lot of other steps too. Like Dave was saying at that point, if we haven't already, we're usually digging into the negotiation notes. And there's tens of thousands of pages of negotiation notes-

Matt McCants:

Wow.

Dan O'Connor:

It's on every topic from benefits to retirement, obviously scheduling. So if we haven't already dug in the notes, we're into the notes at that point, we're really doing a deeper dive. Like Dave said, we have to call on SMEs from other areas sometimes to say, "What was the intent here?" And make sure we have a good foundation for a case before we bring it to a grievance. It all goes, there's a lot of things that are considered when deciding whether to bring something to a grievance or not.

Rob Odom:

We're simultaneously just shepherding all these resources. So a lot of things going on at the same time, we're talking to people who negotiated say a benefits section and then like Dan said, we are in the notes and we have somebody that is digging through and finding those very specific points that we can look at and reference that talk about, for instance, that benefits section. And then we bring all of that together and then that's when we have to put our heads together and then make that decision at that decision point.

David Kudish:

One of the things I think that can be frustrating to pilots is that what they're not seeing is that while we're doing that, we're talking to the SMEs and looking at the notes, one of the things that we have to consider there is, okay, if we grieve this and we don't get a resolution, which for the reasons we're describing, by the time we get to an actual, people call it a formal grievance, there's no such thing as a formal, it's just a grievance. But when we get to a grievance, we've already worked so hard in so many different ways to try to avoid getting this grievance that the chances of going to a grievance hearing and having the flight ops, it's always a designee. It's supposed to be a hearing with the vice president of flight ops or his designee, and it's always his designee.

So now you're looking at it and you're thinking, "Okay, this is likely to go to arbitration." And so what we're doing in the background is I'm talking to the people that negotiated it and one of the questions I'm asking them is, "What are you going to say when I put you on the stand? There are reasons sometimes where we don't take things to grievances and people look at that and say, "How could you not do that? I see this thing and it says, this language says that." And so they just don't see that these things are going on the background.

I know that pilots have a hard time trusting things they can't see and feel. And this is one of those difficult things that I can't show you that because anything that even this podcast, anything we write down or say, we will see it again in an arbitration or coming back at us from the company. It's happened before. Recently we had a settlement, but as we were preparing for the arbitration, one was Rob's article. So we always have to be mindful that what we're saying publicly is public. It's going to come back to us probably.

One of the reasons we did the rewrite was to get better and clearer language and the other reason was to help attack the past practice because that frustrates everyone. No one more than me or us, that, "Well, it's always been this way. And back in 1984, Brian Cobb was getting in his car and told so-and-so this thing." And that was really frustrating to us.

And so that think it accomplished that. But what people will occasionally say is, "I thought you rewrote this to get better language. Why do we have these disputes?" And I tell people the same thing, lawyers have jobs for a reason. Nobody can write perfect language. And these airline contracts are extremely complicated. People force things into the box that they understand. And I've flown with guys, "Well, my wife's a contract attorney and she says it should say this." And I'm like, "Is she a labor contract attorney? Because it's very specialized." Everything we do is.

So the point being there's no perfect language, there's always going to be gray areas if it wouldn't get to us if it wasn't a gray area.

Matt McCants:

But let's compare and contrast since we're talking about grievances in general and frame it for everybody who doesn't remember how many grievances we had open at the end of the last contract and where we stand today and what does that say?

David Kudish:

Yeah, that's a good point. When we were closing out the last CVA we had on the order of 150 grievances we had to adjudicate, but I think a better example of where we are and what we've accomplished is that in the first year after the previous CVA was ratified, we had about 170 grievances. And then the next year we had in about another 150 grievances.

Matt McCants:

Wow.

David Kudish:

And to this point we've had some settlements, but to this point we have 14 contract interpretation grievances. There's some other grievances that are involving discipline issues and are not really contract interpretation issues, but we have 14 grievances involving contract interpretations. We've had some settlements, but to me that's the best statement you can make about how much better the language is and the cooperation, the work we're doing on both sides to try to solve disputes.

Dan O'Connor:

And it speaks to the process that was laid out when the CVA was ratified to address these issues also.

Matt McCants:

You mentioned a little bit earlier there's a grievance hearing and that's just a meeting, an official meeting now between you and just the company still and potentially getting us, me your decision maker in the room. If like you said, that issue hasn't been resolved to that point, it's unlikely that it's going to get resolved at that grievance hearing. What's that next step? And what does that look like and what does that mean to our membership when you go to an SBOA?

David Kudish:

An SBOA stands for systems board of Adjustment commonly called arbitration, and that's our end game. That's as far as it goes in our world essentially. And so that's a hearing with an arbitrator, a very specialized, typically the arbitrators we use specialize in airline cases because again, these contracts are very complex. And so we schedule this with an arbitrator and it's a five-person panel. The arbitrator heads the panel. The union has two board members on the panel and the company chooses two board members for the panel. And it's a formal... It's as close to if you picture a courtroom, it's similar to that except it's usually in a hotel hearing conference room, the table, it's like a U-shaped table with the arbitrator and his panel at the head of the table, the union on one side of the U and the company on the other side of the U. And a table in the middle with a witness and a court stenographer and the arbitrator. It's less formal than court, but you would understand it similar to a court case where the arbitrator is like a judge.

And both sides put on their case and the arbitrator hears the case. Because it is a little bit more informal the board members will be able to ask questions of witnesses. The arbitrator can ask questions of witnesses. Both sides typically use outside counsel. So we have attorneys that we hire for each case based on a number of factors and the company does the same. And so those outside counsel typically put on the case. And then the arbitrator typically takes months. So the process is a long one. The arbitrator might not give us a decision for six or eight or nine months afterwards. And whatever that decision is, there is with very limited exceptions, there's really no appealing of an arbitrator's decision. And arbitrators decisions do set precedent.

And so people say arbitrators are arbitrary. And it is difficult. You really don't know what an arbitrator is going to do. You can look at their past decisions, you can try to glean from those what they might... And both sides try to do that, but at the end of the day, you're just putting the best case you can forward. And a lot of attorneys like to say that it's 90% horse, 10% rider when it comes to an arbitration case. Meaning the case is the case, no matter you could have the best attorney on the planet presenting it, it's really not going to affect your case that much. The case is the case.

Matt McCants:

And I think to tie all these things together, we've talked about a number of different processes and this seems to be a building block thing. You're trying to get everything solved at the lowest level. If it doesn't work there, it escalates to here into these weekly meetings. It doesn't work there escalates to JIC in the monthly meetings. It doesn't work there hey, maybe we end up having a grievance out of it. It doesn't work there keeps going. We have all these different processes that build on each other. Not too long ago we had a settlement about max pay. Is this a good example of how some of these definitions and processes ultimately play out?

David Kudish:

Yeah, that was the culmination of a lot of effort. And so yeah, that was a case that it went through all the different processes internally through the grievance hearing and onto arbitration. We hired outside counsel. And these arbitrations are, they take a lot of effort from the organization as a whole. The union puts a lot of resources into these, a lot of money and a lot of man-hours. And so when we're preparing for an arbitration, that is all the department is essentially doing. And so it takes a lot of effort from the whole team.

Anyway, in the max pay we presented to the arbitrator and I think he took seven or eight months to get that decision back. Ultimately, he sided with the union and it was between a 6 to $7 million settlement that we got. And I think it was a good example of a win in arbitration.

Matt McCants:

The grievance process is a long one and there's other opportunities before we get to the arbitrator to maybe make a settlement. Why is that a good option for us instead of going all the way through the arbitration process?

David Kudish:

Well, there's a couple of things at play there. One of them is that, again, it's a real challenge for us to get a decision maker with the proper depth of knowledge to get to talk to that person. There's just a lot of filters in the way of that happening. And so a lot of times when we get through the grievance process and it's denied and we get to the SBOA process and as we're preparing, so now this is the first time probably for the company, I mean we can't know 100% what happens over at the company, but our belief is that this is the first time someone on the company side with some objectivity is looking at the case.

And we are also taking a deeper dive into the case with outside counsel, but at that point we often will get settlements. And I believe it's just because someone, again, with some objectivity looks at it and is probably telling the company, "Hey, your case probably isn't as good as you think it is and here's why you might want to consider settling."

And so even if we were in a case where we are 100% sure, "Hey, we've got this great case and we're really confident in our case," if the company comes to us with a settlement offer, we always have to seriously consider that because it's the certain gain versus uncertain loss. So if a settlement, if it meets our needs, then that's something we have to talk about with the team. And at that point, there's a lot of people, that's not just a decision-

Matt McCants:

It's the board too.

David Kudish:

That's what I'm saying at that point. It's not just made by me or the contract that now the board is when we get to an SBOA, now we are talking to the board. I mean we talk to the board about all the grievances really, but just at varying levels of depth.

Matt McCants:

Sure.

David Kudish:

And so when it gets to that point, yeah, the board's involved and we're telling them, Hey, this is why we think this is a good thing and we should accept the settlement even if it's maybe not 100% of what we wanted. If it's 90% of what we wanted.

Matt McCants:

All right, so we promised some hot topics and maybe this is an appropriate segue into all things pay. We put out quite a bit of comm about the pay audit tool, where it lives, how and when to use it. And we've also put some comment out, have we recently about the batch pay audits that you do. Let's review all these different layers we have to ensure accurate pay does ultimately get captured.

Dan O'Connor:

So let's address two different things. First of all, the individual pay audit tool that you mentioned can be accessed either through the app or the website. Let's talk about auditing your own pairings. Our request is once your pairing is complete, wait until it says audit complete on the pairing. That means the company has had the chance to go back and do their audit.

And just a reminder, we do have some CBA language that will implement next year. I believe it's by the end of the second quarter to require in most cases five business days to complete the audit, 10 additional days under some certain circumstances. But that's only if the system gets really messed up. So in most cases, just five days to do the audit. Once that audit says complete, that's a good time to go into the pay audit tool. Like I said, either in the app or on the website, all you have to do is put in the date of the pairing, the check and the pairing, it will run the audit tool and it'll come back with a value including overrides.

Just a quick reminder, there's a few disclaimers at the bottom. Please read those because the audit tool does not accurately assess certain situations like a JAU into a GDO, combining pairings, that sort of thing. So please read those disclaimers, but in most cases the audit tool will come back with a value. At that point you can compare that value from the audit tool to what the company's audit was. If they're the same, you're good to go. If they're not, we request that you send that information into Southwest payroll because they're the ones that actually have to make the change. We can't make any changes here from SWAPA.

If you do not get a satisfactory answer back from Southwest payroll on it, then we ask that you send that to us, our SMEs and Contract Admin, the staff will look at it and then if we agree there's a discrepancy, we will send that over like Dave said earlier, with the daily issues and address it from there and take it down that path. So that's the individual pay audit tool.

As far as the batch audit system. So the batch system actually goes in and uses the same code developed by SAC for the individual pay audit tool. It goes back and it looks at all the pairings.

Matt McCants:

All of them, everybody's?

Dan O'Connor:

All the pairings.

David Kudish:

And that's an important point.

Dan O'Connor:

Yes, all of the pairings automatically. So what happens is it will kick back a report. Again, this happens later and I'll explain why that happens later in a second, but this happens usually in the next bid period. After the previous bid period is closed out, it'll go back and look at all of them. If there's a discrepancy, those discrepancies again go to our SMEs on the staff and they review those.

Sometimes it's because of the issues I mentioned earlier where the audit tool does not correctly assess the pay, but if there is a discrepancy, then we send that over to get fixed. Right now that happens behind the scenes. The pilots are not aware that their pay was adjusted. We are looking at some future enhancements to allow a message to go to the pilots to say, "Hey, your pay has been adjusted on this pairing for this reason." Right now it'll just happen in the background. The pilots won't even know there'll just be an adjustment on their payroll.

The reason that it's not done until later in the month, there is a few overrides that the company actually has to go back and assess through a query in the new bid period. In other words, after October is closed out in the first week, week and a half of November, they run queries specifically for RRO, LRO and certain GTO scenarios. Run a query, capture those and then go and add the override as necessary on a pilot's board.

David Kudish:

The reason it's important I think to get that information out there because we understand we have a range of pilots and so we want to make people have a comfort level that even if you don't pay any attention to your pay whatsoever, if you never think to audit it, somebody's looking at it, we are looking at it and we have your back, we're going to make sure you're paid correctly. But what goes with that, what we're asking for a partnership from the membership on is not to ask for pay audits for things that haven't been audited yet, do your part of it first because like I said, we get probably 200 emails a day and probably another 70 calls a day and maybe fully half of those are people asking for pay audits that the company's not even, they just flew.

We got just one I just saw come in, the person finished the trip two days ago and they said, "Hey, I feel this trip and there was some change. I just want to make sure I'm getting paid correctly." And so the staff is going to answer him, they're going to look in, they're going to do that work for him, but we only have, we have 11 people that are actually answering emails, but there's not really 11 because a few of them are on special projects. So really there's probably five staffers on any given day answering questions.

And so if they're doing your pay audit for a trip from two days ago that hasn't even been audited by the company yet, they're not answering Dan's call, who's trying to figure out if he should have gotten an open time award because they have to take things in the queue. And so it's binding up the system-

Dan O'Connor:

It just bogs us down.

David Kudish:

... when you're asking for those. It does bog us.

Rob Odom:

They really do have to triage things that come in and when you throw a bunch of issues on top of it or questions that aren't time sensitive, then it does bog down the system.

Matt McCants:

Yeah, so what I'm hearing you guys say is first exercise a little patience, wait for the process to play out. Second, do a little bit of homework. And we have great resources here at SWAPA that can help you do that. This scheduling handbook, all of these resources out there, read into the contract a little bit, especially if you have a fairly simple question about, "Why did this pay this way? Why didn't this override apply to my situation?"

But we also have a great tool that's relatively new, about six months out there on the line that was developed by one of our FOs, Thomas Lowry, who's now part of our IT committee. And he wrote a language model and developed that concept through you guys in Contract Admin and with the SAC.

Tony Mulhare:

And then we finally got it released in early August, and that's the contract AI model. And it can help answer some of those low-hanging fruit type questions to allow your staff to dive into the deeper issues that a little bit more evolved. So talk us through that tool and how that's useful and what you would like our pilots to do with that?

Rob Odom:

It is a useful tool. Like you said, it's new, it's in the beta process, so it doesn't probably have that third generation or third tier problem solving capability, but it is a very good tool to ask simple questions and at least points you in the right direction. It'll bring up an answer and then it'll also give you the references that are hyperlinked. And that's a great tool just in and of itself if you wanted to see what reserve or open time.

David Kudish:

Or I'm probably more familiar with the contract than most people, but there's questions come in and I'm like, "Shoot, where was that in?" And a lot of stuff's like the general second, a lot of stuff's in general. But anyway, I will go to the AI tool and just let it point me in the right direction. It can't answer complex questions and it-

Dan O'Connor:

It doesn't critically think.

David Kudish:

Right. But it's really good for pointing you in the right direction. And I think pilots do have a responsibility to have a basic contract knowledge. And it will help you do that if you just ask it the question, let it point you to the language. Read the language. 25% of the questions we get really are answered if you just looked at the language.

Matt McCants:

The other nice thing about it and what we worked on with it was contracts just in general are hard to word search you word search our CBA for something like reserve and how many hundreds of opportunities do you have to go down rabbit holes. And that's where I think Contract AI has been a nice bridge between just word searching the CBA and then showing up on your guys' front step with a question.

And I think some of what we're hearing too is no matter how you came up flying, there is a concept amongst pilots of mutual support. And part of understanding the contract and using some of these tools is freeing up your guys' bandwidth to assist pilots who really need it because there are some other serious issues out there that are time sensitive. They're very complicated. And that's where we need the subject matter experts to Contract App and your staff to be assisting them actively.

So that's why we created these tools. It's not just to educate you and give you more resources, it's to let the pilot group itself help take care of itself. The smarter we are collectively on the CBA, the better off we are. And the better the next contract is going to be too. Because you can't start to build the next better contract if you don't have firm understanding of the one you're in.

So thank you for everybody who's participated in bringing all these tools out. I've learned a lot out there. And we're talking about customer service in general and that's a lot of what you guys do. And like we were saying, we've all been on the giving end rather of a customer service situation. You're on the receiving end.

And this last topic is a bit of a pivot, but it's related to what I was talking about earlier and that very important stuff that you guys assist with and that's disciplined cases in investigations. For any number of reasons, a pilot might find him or herself in a situation with a company. And as we've said a million times, please make SWAPA your first call no matter what. And then reps get involved in some cases. And a lot of times you guys do too.

So let's foot stomp a couple things here that are worth reminding everybody of and namely those rules and regulations that are set by the company that we're ultimately responsible for.

Rob Odom:

As employees, you're responsible for knowing and understanding and following certain guidelines that the company has set out in their right to manage. And those include the social media policy, drug and alcohol policy, the guideline for employees-

Matt McCants:

Commonly known as the GFE.

Rob Odom:

GFE. And the flight operations employee handbook. And so those are the guidelines, the provisions that the company has set forth that they say you have to abide by. And those are usually, I believe, on a twice a year acknowledgement via email online. And those have the provisions in there that you're supposed to follow as employees.

The one that's specific to our department is the flight operations employee handbook. I mentioned it, but that's the one that is specific to our department and it has a list of dos and don'ts and other information that you really need to be responsible to as a flight ops employee.

David Kudish:

It's like any other law. Just because you don't know what the law says doesn't mean you're not responsible for following it.

Matt McCants:

Sure.

David Kudish:

And so a lot of times people will find themselves sideways with the company on something and they'll be in a meeting and the company will point to the FOEH and say, "It says we're here, you can't do that." And they'll be like, "I've never seen that before in my life." And it's like, "Well, you're still responsible for it." And this is not disparaging the chief pilots. I think they do a good job by and large, it's just they have a job to do and they're doing it. So when they call you, even when it's in a friendly tone, "Hey Matt, I just want to talk to you about something." So when you get that call, you need to be aware you're in jeopardy here, no matter what they tell you, we just want to have a talk, you are in jeopardy.

And you should ask, "Is there any possibility of discipline coming out of this talk?" And almost no matter what they say, there is always a possibility of discipline coming out of a talk with management. And so the right thing to do, what we recommend you do is respectfully just, "Hey, I'd like to get my SWAPA rep involved. Can I call you back?" Hang up the phone, call your rep, get them involved right away because you are in jeopardy every time.

And like I said, it's not a statement about the chief pilots, they're doing their job, but they're going to do their job. And so let us do our job and help you. Pick up the phone and call your rep. And those reps are trained and experienced and they are essentially the traffic cops of SWAPA.

They should pretty much always be your first call. They won't always know the answer, but they will know who does know the answer. And they'll direct you in the right way to go and then we can get you into our processes to take care of you.

Dan O'Connor:

Just a quick public service announcement, what you say or post on social media can and will be used against you.

Rob Odom:

That's an important point, Dan, because if your social media ties you to the company and then what you post on the social media is offensive or allegedly offensive or discriminatory or what have you, any nexus to the company, they'll question you on it and you open yourself up.

David Kudish:

Let me expand on that. I often hear pilots say, "I have freedom of speech." Yes, you have freedom of speech from the government, not from your employer. And so that is a concept that really is not always well understood.

And I want to expand on what Rob said about the nexus. So arbitrators have found that companies have the right to protect their brand. And so in protecting their brand, if there's a nexus, if there's a connection that somebody can make between you and your social media existence and Southwest Airlines, that's a nexus. And now you're responsible, you're potentially under discipline for something you say.

The problem that we have is that there's almost always a nexus between you and Southwest Airlines. Even if you don't, most people say, "Heavy equipment operator, work for a major airline," whatever you want to say, if you have a picture of you at the training center. But if you have a picture, there's almost always, and even it's gotten to the point where just doing a social media search in general, if you're on LinkedIn, you show that you work for Southwest, but then on this other social media site you don't, well, there's potentially still a nexus there. And so you have to be really careful what you say because it's easy to offend somebody on social media these days.

Matt McCants:

The parallels are going to be drawn. Everything that you do digitally is going to show up somewhere. And it is very difficult to try to, for lack of a better term, negotiate your way out of what somebody reads or sees or describe intent. So if you're thinking about saying anything remotely questionable online, please just take a minute and think about it. And picture yourself having to explain what you just posted, this has happened.

And I think if you just give it a little bit of time and think about the potential consequences, think about your career here, is it really worth risking the career that you have here for something that you might find funny that somebody else won't? And I think 10 times out of 10, the answer there is no.

David Kudish:

Yeah, and really I would almost expand on that. It's unfortunate that this is the case, but it is. Online when you're in the hotel van, when you're in the hotel bar, when you're in the cockpit telling stories with the door open at the gate, interacting with different people, it's just the world we live in now people are easily offended. We still get pilots that feel the need to give their opinion about a other people's choices. And you keep your opinion to yourself honestly. When you're at work, you're at work. It's not the place to talk about politics, things that are charged in our society. There's a lot of charge topics and it's best to keep those away from work.

Because a lot of our discipline cases, it's as simple as one of those examples I just mentioned. And you get sideways with someone and now you're getting written up and it's extremely uncomfortable to be sitting in the chief pilot's office at a 21E with your reps and we've all, everyone's sitting here has seen a million of those and you don't want to be there. And it's easy to avoid if you just stay away from those topics while you're at work.

Matt McCants:

If you do get that phone call and then you call your reps, how does your committee interplay in that process in getting ready for that meeting?

Rob Odom:

Well, like you said, they call the reps first and they take the lead and they're there to help you. They're trained to help you. And Contract Admin will assist the reps and the pilot through that process. We'll help them answer any questions they might have. And a lot of times the reps are very, very good at ensuring that the contractual provisions are followed, that if you do have a meeting, there is a meeting notification given to you, et cetera. But if they have any questions throughout that process, we're there to help them.

David Kudish:

So the reps coordinate the meeting. And so we are working with the reps to make sure that all the contractual provisions are followed, whether it's meeting notifications, through the hearing itself, making sure that the pilot member is comfortable with what are you being accused of, what's being investigated? And so we help to work with them to help them understand and be ready to go to that 21E.

And then afterwards, if there is discipline issued or in the intervening period between when the meeting is held and when any potential discipline, now we are the resource for the reps to say, "Hey, what has been given in the past?" Because people have to be treated fairly and disparate treatment is an important thing we have to avoid. So we have to make sure that, and no two things are exactly the same, but for the same type of offense, the same type of adjudication is carried out.

Matt McCants:

Yeah, absolutely. All right, so let's wrap this up today and obviously everybody in the room not named Matt or Tony is a certified expert on our contract or as close to one as you can be. So what are some of the best practices that you would like our pilots to know so they can walk away from this discussion with a better overall experience at home and on the line?

Dan O'Connor:

Like you said before, SWAPA is a service organization and we're always here to answer your questions. That being said, we do have a request. When you have a question for Contract Admin, we request that you email Contract Admin at ContractAdmin@SWAPA.org. You can always call. But what we would like to see is the phone calls be kept for time critical and sensitive issues.

For example, you're out on the line, you have a question right now about your pairing illegality, that sort of thing. Most of the issues are not time sensitive and can be handled through an email. And there's a couple reasons for that. One is we now have a new system of tracking where when the emails come in, like Dave mentioned before, they're farmed out to the appropriate SME or person on the staff to answer those. We collect data on those, on the topic being addressed and it's actually tracked throughout the system.

I can tell you multiple emails don't get a quicker response than one email. We don't sit and say, "We're just not going to answer that one."

David Kudish:

Well, and actually it's worse than that. So because of the system where they assign the workout, if you send three emails and make two phone calls, that's five cases that have been opened. And those five cases have been assigned to potentially different people. And because of the way the system works, they don't necessarily know that someone else is already working on that. So now you've actually created five times the work. And I know people mean well, that's why we're doing it. We're just telling them that you don't realize you're doing this, but we are getting to you as fast as we can. But by creating multiple cases, you're slowing the whole system down.

Rob Odom:

Going through this discussion, I think a couple points that I'd reemphasize are use the resources that we have built for you on the website. I think getting in there and using that AI beta tool as a starting point is great education. This is your contract, you live under it and to be educated on it's very important. Use those tools and resources.

And then I'd just on a second point, like to hammer, again, call your reps if there is any question, if you get a call from the chief pilot or have any issue there, just call your reps first and keep them in the loop.

Dan O'Connor:

Yeah, I think one of the places I see a lot of bad information is on social media. And I think be careful getting your information from social media. Go to Contract AI and ask the question. There's lots of people out there that are very knowledgeable on the contract and you can talk to them out online in the cockpit. But social media, I just see a lot of bad information out there on social media. And we can't chase down every bad post. So it's good for what it's good for, but when you have a contract question that matters, just come to the experts, write an email and ask the question or go to Contract AI or something. But just be careful where you get your information from.

Matt McCants:

Tell me if you think I'm completely off here, try to just take a look at all your pay one time and make that one time the 11th of the next month. Because then you'll have captured all the overrides that get built in from all the previous pairings that they have uploaded. And you can look back at all your previous month's trips. And then if you see something that just doesn't seem right, give us a call or run the pay audit tool. Does that make sense?

David Kudish:

Yeah.

Matt McCants:

Is wait until the 11th.

David Kudish:

And yeah, because occasionally if you look at your pay before it's audited, you're either doing the work twice or you're doing it just wrong once. Because if they audit it after you've looked at it and you say, "Oh, that looks right," and then they audit it and change it, you're not going to catch it.

Dan O'Connor:

Another tool that you mentioned earlier, Matt, was the scheduling handbook. Excellent information in there. They do have a whole section on your pay and there's some very good points in there, such as all of the overrides do not show on the pairing when you click it, you have to go to your payroll report to find all of your overrides. We get that question still continuously.

David Kudish:

All the time. Fatigue.

Dan O'Connor:

So please educate yourself. Yes, fatigue is another one. There's a lot of things you have to look on that payroll report for to put it all together like you said. And it is a good technique to do it after the 11th because all that will be on there because like we talked about before, with them capturing the overrides early in the following bid periods.

Tony Mulhare:

And fun fact, the next thing that's going into the Contract AI index, the scheduling handbook.

David Kudish:

That will be a great ad. Yeah, because there's so much good information in there. I've been doing this a long time and I learned stuff reading that.

Matt McCants:

And that's constantly being updated as we continue to implement more and more items. And there's quite a few that are coming later this year by the end of the year.

Tony Mulhare:

All right Dave, let's put a bow on all these topics and leave us with a parting thought.

David Kudish:

If you're someone who really doesn't want to track your pay and you just don't want to be bothered with that, we get it. A lot of people are like that. There's nothing wrong with that. And we have a process there. We're checking your pay and if it's not right, we'll get it right and we'll get you paid. And if you're someone that wants to track every piece of your pay, that's good too. And we will help you to do that and answer any questions that you have.

And I think the biggest takeaway from all this is we have a really good contract and we understand maybe more than anyone how hard fought it was to get it. And we take our job seriously of enforcing it and making sure it's complied with. And that's our charter and we work hard to do that every day.

Matt McCants:

We'd like to thank our guests today and all of our Contract Admin staff for the tireless work they put in supporting the membership. Straight from the SWAPA strategic plan, "We are more than a bargaining entity. We are a full service association." And this is one of those key services our pilots rely on 24/7. If you have any feedback for this podcast or any of our comm products, please reach out to us at comm@SWAPA.org. We really do want to hear from you.

Tony Mulhare:

Finally, today's bonus number is 15,000. That's roughly the number of queries the Contract AI has received. As we've discussed it's a useful tool that can save you time and get that low hanging fruit that might be easier than a word search on the contract, but if it doesn't, it'll let the watchful eye of Contract Admin is got you covered everywhere else.