Southwest Airlines announces layoffs impacting over 1,000 employees at its Dallas headquarters for the first time in 53 years.
DALLAS — For the first time in 53 years, Southwest Airlines is undergoing mass layoffs.
The Dallas-based company will lay off over 1,000 people, or one out of seven employees, at its corporate headquarters.
The unprecedented move comes amid a gigantic shakeup at one of North Texas’s biggest employers. Steve Cosgrove, publisher of Airways magazine, said employees were struggling to cope with the uncertainty after layoffs were announced.
“I mean they were crying, their voices were breaking over the phone because they don’t know if it’s going to be the one-year employee or the 38-year employee that’s going to get laid off,” Cosgrove said. “It’s really shattered the culture there.”
The layoffs will not impact customer-facing and union roles such as flight attendants, pilots and gate agents, so customers may not immediately notice a change, Cosgrove said. Union employees being insulated from the layoffs has created an “us versus them” dynamic at headquarters, Cosgrove said.
“Some of the headquarters people feel that part of these layoffs was because of the raises the pilots and flight attendants got, which isn’t true because they went without contracts for years,” Cosgrove said. “It’s set up an us versus them situation in a company that was always all for one, one for all.”
The airline hopes to cut $500 million in expenses as the company works to become more profitable, Cosgrove said. The layoffs will only cut about half that goal amount, he said.
“I don’t know how they do the other $200 million, maybe through improved efficiencies and stuff like that,” Cosgrove said. “This is such a cold and calculated corporate-type move that Southwest is not known for and the employees aren’t used to, so it really did stun them when the email came out yesterday.”
One set of employees may be particularly affected by the layoffs, Cosgrove said. So-called “love couples” who met while working at Southwest, got married and continued working for the airline.
“Now both of them aren’t sure whether they’ve got a job,” Cosgrove said.
