Southwest Airlines: New leave for employees (pilots, flight attendants)

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines has been offering a new round of statutory holidays to employees as it tries to overcome the continuing financial difficulties linked to the outbreak, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

Southwest offers employees the choice of taking an exceptional voluntary outing starting March 1, as well as packages ranging from one to six weeks depending on their own workgroup.

The airline has lost around $ 10 million every day in the previous 3 out of 20 weeks, and US airline traffic is still down 60% against equal days per year before the official spread of the COVID pandemic -19 in Asia.

In the past two weeks, Southwest received the very first part of its $ 1.2 billion government grant to cover employee salaries.

This included funding to get around $ 488 billion.

Southwest had about 56,000 employees in November, according to national statistics, about 3,500 fewer from a year earlier today.

Airlines as a whole have reduced the number of flights by 44% from last year, as reported by US airlines.