Amazon expands flexibility for some employees to work from home indefinitely.

“Joe Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate at work!” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said Sunday night on Twitter. “Suddenly, we’re short on pilots air traffic controllers.” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, echoed those comments on Monday.

In a statement, Southwest said its problems began in Florida over the weekend.

“We experienced weather challenges in our Florida airports at the beginning of the weekend, challenges that were compounded by unexpected air traffic control issues in the same region, triggering delays and prompting significant cancellations for us beginning Friday evening,” the airline said. “We’ve continued diligent work throughout the weekend to reset our operation with a focus on getting aircraft and crews repositioned to take care of our customers.”

The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that some flights were delayed or canceled on Friday because of severe weather, military training exercises and a brief staffing shortage at one air traffic control center, but it said the disruption only lasted a few hours.

“Some airlines continue to experience scheduling challenges due to aircraft and crews being out of place,” the agency said in a statement.

Casey Murray, the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said pilots called in sick at a normal rate this weekend.

The widespread cancellations, he said, were instead caused by technological issues and problems with how pilots are reassigned and rerouted during disruptions, a process complicated by Southwest’s uniquely large, point-to-point network. In a typical day, about 10 percent of pilots are reassigned from the flights they were scheduled to operate. That figure was 71 percent on Saturday and 85 percent on Sunday, according to Mr. Murray.

“That is unsustainable,” he said. “The domino effect continues, and what we see, due to some internal failures, is it’s happening so many times that they just can’t move everyone.”

The union also said in a statement on Sunday that its members are barred by federal law from using a strike to resolve a labor dispute without exhausting other options first.

While the union, which says it does not oppose vaccination, denied that its members were calling in sick to protest the mandate, it did ask a judge on Friday to stop the airline from enacting the vaccine mandate and other policies. The request is part of a broader lawsuit that predates the mandate and centers on the union’s assertion that Southwest has taken a number of “unilateral actions” in violation of labor law.

Southwest isn’t alone in seeing pushback from employees over a vaccine mandate. Last week, hundreds of American Airlines workers and supporters protested its new mandate outside that airline’s Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters, according to The Dallas Morning News.

But many others have voiced support for such requirements. United Airlines, the first large U.S. airline to impose a mandate, has said that nearly all of its 67,000 employees had been vaccinated, with the exception of about 2,000 who had applied for religious or medical exemptions. United said it expects to have to fire fewer than 250 employees for failing to comply. The airline’s executives had expected some blowback but were surprised by the positive reaction, noting that it had received many more applicants for open flight attendant positions than it used to before the pandemic.

“I did not appreciate the intensity of support for a vaccine mandate that existed, because you hear that loud anti-vax voice a lot more than you hear the people that want it,” United’s chief executive, Scott Kirby, told The New York Times this month. “But there are more of them. And they’re just as intense.”

Delta Air Lines has not imposed a vaccination requirement, but it said it will charge unvaccinated employees $200 more a month for health insurance.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/10/11/business/news-business-stock-market