The separate OC was determined the best part of a year before ALPA certified, as part of the decision on the best way to setup Swoop to respond to the ULCC threat. It is unfortunate that it became the centre of the union issues. I’m sure Gregg thought he could work through the issues, but the effect on labour of having a separate OC was only a small part of the decision, unfortunately timing is everything and it ended up being a red flag in front of a bull. The reasons for having a separate OC are still sound, effectively giving Swoop a very independent capability to run their own operation as they see fit, diverging significantly from the way WestJet operates.Transonic wrote: ↑Fri Jul 20, 2018 6:41 pmThanks for the input aerobod. It's well appreciated.aerobod wrote: ↑Thu Jul 19, 2018 8:30 pmIt is a strategic decision, pragmatically arrived at. Understanding why by talking to the people who are close to the decision will put it in context, otherwise it is easy to descend into paranoia by reading things into a decision that didn’t and don’t exist.
I find it difficult to understand you can "pragmatically" conclude that circumventing unionized labour is low risk. This during a time when an Air France executive had his shirt torn off by a angry mob over the start of Joon.
The decision of a separate OC and therefore separate labour group resulted in the 91% strike vote. Even Gregg in the Q4 conference call stated that "bad things happen when you violate scope clauses" and that we had a "virtual scope clause" with our pilots.
The pragmatic solution would have been to work with your existing labour groups and not bypass them.
From my perspective (at least before I moved into Retiree state last quarter) one specific example of how a separate OC was beneficial is the setup of Trax. Everything is compartmentalised for Swoop, using slimmed down processes and parts inventory just for 189 seat 737-800s, governance and documentation is simplified and not polluted by the far more complex mainline requirements and things as simple as email and audit trail in Office 365 can be accomplished at 10% of the cost compared with mainline. The overall knock-on effect of the separate OC, with simplified and very reduced IT requirementsis across the board is that Swoop IT costs less than half the cost of mainline IT per ticket (which itself is only about 2/3 of industry average for legacy airlines).