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Southwest Airlines plans to hire 8,000 more workers next year, incoming CEO Robert Jordan says

The Dallas-based airline is in the midst of hiring 5,000 new workers by the fall, but challenges persist during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Southwest Airlines will hire another 8,000 workers next year on top of the 5,000 it’s hoping to hire before this holiday season as the carrier looks to rebuild its network after the COVID-19 pandemic, incoming CEO Robert Jordan said Thursday.

“We anticipate we are going to hire about 8,000 next year in all workgroups and again primarily on the front lines,” said Jordan at the Skift Global Forum in New York on Thursday. “We’ve never had any issue attracting applicants and even we are finding it hard.”

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Dallas-based Southwest Airlines is facing a challenge not unique in the business world at the moment, trying to ramp up operations after the early COVID-19 outbreak forced it to shed thousands of jobs. Southwest is 7,000 employees smaller than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, 11% of its workforce, according to federal data.

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“Job one this fall is we have to get staffed and get stable in our operation because stability in our operation depends on getting staffed right,” said Jordan, a 33-year Southwest veteran who will take over for retiring CEO Gary Kelly in February.

The airline has raised its minimum wage, started offering employee referral bonuses and is holding hiring events across the country. Even with all those efforts and aggressive hiring targets, Southwest has decided to cut back its flying schedule this fall based on staffing challenges.

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“We’ve de facto become a country with a $15 minimum wage, it feels like,” said Jordan, the company’s executive vice president of corporate services.

Southwest raised it minimum wage to $15 an hour this summer.

Airlines along with thousands of other businesses are also facing a shortage of workers. The U.S. labor force is about 3 million people smaller than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic and that doesn’t account for the millions of new workers that should have been added to the labor force during that time.

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Southwest has nearly 55,000 employees nationwide, including about 10,200 in the Dallas area.

Southwest has seen a drop-off in the number of applicants it gets for each open position. Before the pandemic, it would get about 42 applicants for each job, Jordan said. Now it gets about 14.

And even by the time it gets applications, many of those candidates have already accepted new positions at other companies, Southwest Airlines chief recruiter Greg Muccio said.

“I go through the Whataburger drive-through and I pay and get my bag, and stapled to the bag is a job application,” Jordan said. “That’s what it’s come to.”

Jordan said he was recently in Denver for a hiring event for 250 ramp workers. Despite higher starting wages, a union pay scale that increases yearly and travel benefits, it’s still tough to get people to drive to the airport when there are “30 places that have job openings posted in the window.”

The hiring goals will be a key to Southwest’s ability to get back to pre-pandemic levels and expand. The airline is planning to add 114 new airplanes next year, all Boeing 737 Max models, to help fill in the gaps left when the carrier added 18 new destinations over the last two years without adding many workers.

The airline likely won’t see the flood of new destinations it added over the last 18 months, he said.

“The vast majority of the 114 aircraft we’re getting next year — which is a record, by the way — they’re going to restoring the network depth to what we were pre-pandemic,” Jordan said.

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Most of those incoming airplanes will go to replace airplanes that were retired during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.