Dallas-based Southwest Airlines has hired 10,000 employees since January, bringing it back to pre-COVID staffing levels faster than the other major carriers.
Southwest’s 62,040 employees in May 2022 is slightly more than the number of workers the company had during the same month in 2019, according to government airline employment figures. Southwest still remains 400 workers below the peak workforce total it hit in March 2020, the same month a worldwide pandemic was declared and airlines stopped hiring workers because air travel demand was faltering.
At the pandemic peak, Southwest had trimmed nearly 8,000 workers from its payrolls through a series of buyouts, early retirements, attrition and halts on hiring. The U.S. airline industry as a whole had shed more than 80,000 jobs between February and October of 2020. And while those numbers have rebounded above pre-pandemic numbers, most of the growth has been at shipping firms such as FedEx and ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit.
