Lear70, whta's the scoop now that this is public-record?
PCL covered it pretty well.
The company fully expected to LOSE his arbitration, and they expected to WIN mine, so imagine their surprise when it went the other way around, and now he has his job back anyway.
The arbitrator was an idiot; he used the American Airlines arbitrator ruling as a "precedent"... hundreds of pilots in a known, broadcast illegal slowdown versus one guy who wrote up airplanes and didn't carry open writeups around like many do to "just get the airplane home". Yeah, that's the same thing, right?
FWIW, this guy is a retired USAF Lt Col (maybe full bird but I don't think so), so he had his full pension and was working part-time as a tax consultant for H&R Block I believe, as well as flying here and there to stay current, so he survived OK while he was out, but yeah, a little over $1 Million for almost 5 years out of work isn't exactly a "windfall" for a senior line Captain, but it's better than nothing, and the important thing is that he was ALSO ordered REINSTATED to his position by the OSHA ruling.
The previous SWAPA administration along with Chase from this board took a look at trying to get SWA management to intervene and give the guy his job back when we all started this journey in late 2010 (Chase, Don and I had more than a few phone conversations about it), but it never went anywhere, don't know where it stopped at over there. Might have cost the company a lot less money if it had...
At this point, I think that covers all the contract hostages. All of them have been reinstated in one way or another, thank God.
