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 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. \u201cEvery single dollar\u00a0matters as we continue to fight to return to excellent financial performance,\u201d Jordan said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":13953,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}