Southwest Airlines\u00a0is pausing corporate hiring and promotions, suspending most of its summer internships and going without some employee team-building events that date back to the 1980s in order to cut costs and improve margins, CEO Bob Jordan told staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery single dollar\u00a0matters as we continue to fight to return to excellent financial performance,\u201d Jordan said in the note Monday, which was seen by CNBC.<\/p>\n
He said the company will delay other activities \u201cwhen it makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Southwest spokeswoman confirmed the changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll continue to evaluate hiring needs on an ongoing basis to determine when it makes sense for the business to resume hiring,\u201d she said in an email.<\/p>\n
As part of the cost cuts, Southwest is pausing its employee \u201crallies,\u201d a company team-building tradition that dates back to 1985 in which staff hear from the airline\u2019s leaders about the year\u2019s goals and are treated to food and entertainment.<\/p>\n
Southwest spent months last year under pressure from activist Elliott Investment Management, which called for a CEO change at the carrier. The\u00a0two sides settled\u00a0in October with Elliott winning five Southwest board seats, short of control, and Jordan remaining in the top job.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe made a lot of progress in 2024, and we have a lot of tangible momentum \u2026 but we\u2019re still far from our goal of returning to industry-leading profit margins,\u201d Jordan wrote. \u201cA key risk in 2025 is acting as if the urgency has passed and therefore not sustaining the focus and energy from 2024.\u201d<\/p>\n
The airline last year charted out a\u00a0plan to increase profits\u00a0that includes ditching its more than 50-year-old open seating model in favor of assigned seats and creating a section with extra legroom, flying overnight flights, and more aggressively cutting back unprofitable routes.<\/p>\n
In September, the company\u00a0slashed its flights\u00a0from Atlanta, eliminating jobs, though staff were able to apply to work out of other bases.<\/p>\n
Southwest is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results on Jan. 30. The carrier\u2019s shares are up 14% over the past 12 months, while\u00a0United\u2019s are up more than 160% and shares in\u00a0Delta Air Lines\u00a0and\u00a0American Airlines\u00a0have gained about 70% and 33%, respectively.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Southwest Airlines\u00a0is pausing corporate hiring and promotions, suspending most of its summer internships and going…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6417,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}