iarapilot

Dont ever say we didnt have leverage. This has been going on, since when?!

Tuck

Leverage with what? I've seen AVA offered for about 7 months now in my seat and NEVER seen one VBB taken - not one! It's an insurance policy that costs the Company....nothing you moron. Not sure why they would ever stop except for optics.

But since you are on your whining high horse why don't you tell me how much VBB or AVA there was out there last August? How about how many guys protected min days off? Oh yeah - zero - there was no change year over year. Leverage means jack squat if you can't use it and we COULDN'T because no one wanted to. That's it - simple story. Whining guys like you wanted to say how much leverage they have yet never use it. Leverage matters during negotiations - not some made up period down the line when guys "might really get mad" and decide to use it. Pulleeze.

switch monkey

I sold back 7 days of VAC in March. Not to punch a hole in your theory, or anything...

Red Letter

I am a little confused by your comments in the first paragraph.

You won't see VBB taken, unless you personally track it. I think many of the VBB "volunteers" counted on this to "slip under the radar". The fact that NOBODY was inversed into VBB speaks volumes.

I heard many pilots lamenting that they "couldn't hold" VBB (i.e. it went senior )! That speaks volumes about our "unity".

I don't know of an accurate way to track AVA usage, but I stumbled upon that information very frequently. Fortunately, it was often the same offenders.

Since the time that the CBA was presented for a vote, I stopped tracking the "volunteers" for VBB. To answer your question on VBB in August in the M11F, it was 29 volunteers selling back 217 days (1,302 hours). For the additional time I tracked it (March-July), there were 92 M11F volunteers selling back 767 days (4,602 hours). While we often hear the M11Fs were unified, this data doesn't confirm that (however, relatively, they were more unified than most).

Fleetwide, 865 VBB volunteers sold back over 7,000 days (42,000+ credit hours), from March thru August. The company must have been LTAO whenever the union would talk about unity! Keep in mind that the company could also see the depth of the VBB requests (I had no way of knowing how many "unfilled" requests there were). It was also interesting to see VBB offered in seats, with no takers (rare, but THANK YOU!!), but no inverse filling of the supposed need! That tells me that the company was using VBB as a unity tracking device, as well as a tool for covering up their management failures.

NOTE: 865 vacations were sold back. Some pilots were multiple "offenders", so there were about 750 unique names. A very few figured out how to sell it back "the right way" and I complement them on their ingenuity.

We had leverage for MANY months BEFORE the TA, but TOO many failed to do what many consider to be "the right thing".

For those that say we had and have LEVERAGE, you are 100% correct! For those that are obsessed by this issue, what in the he!! would it have taken to get 95%+ of this "unified group" to grow a set? Obviously the 75% unity (who knows what the actual number was, but since about 750 unique names held VBB and probably another 50% "weren't senior enough to hold it", that would be about 25% of the crew force) was not a significant enough number to get the results we deserved. The bottom line is that unless we are truly unified (95%+), nothing else really matters. Management looked past the Negotiating Committee and they had to be delighted in what they "saw".

I fail to see how a measly 24 hours of pay compensates someone for waiting 6 years for a contract, that will probably be effective for 6-10 years. Based on the pathetic unity I tracked and observed, I very reluctantly voted yes, partially because of the obvious futility in any other outcome. Had I seen true unity, I would have voted no.



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max8222

100% on this post! You nailed it on the head. Wish the union could have posted those numbers. Probably would be considered a job action though.

We had leverage but not enough guts to use it. As I said before, everyone is yelling charge up the hill while only a few are actually doing it. The rest are looking at their extra pay and thinking the rest can pull the load.

Cassell was laughing his ass off everytime the VBB results for the month came back. They did not have to draft much because all the pilots needed to fly the VBB trips as a VTO gave them extra reserves to cover trips with.

FDXLAG

Well don't hold out, how do you sell it back "the right way".

bmxandjets

Second that, how does VBB work and what's the right way?

Raptor

The "right way" I can think of is to take VBB and drop your schedule.

busdriver12

No doubt, many people do that. But to actually track who is selling their vacation back (to include determining the people who are swapping vacation or dropping their trips after buyback) is strangely disturbing. Why anyone would care to monitor people's lives that closely is beyond my comprehension.

Adlerdriver

If the company is soliciting VBB, why would a drop be approved?

Pretty "gutsy" gamble - VBB and then.....oops, insufficient reserves on the drop request - Well, they tried to do it "right", guess it'll be a big month after all.

Sounds like the guys dropping their schedule and taking draft during negotiations - working to bring the company to its knees, 150% at a time.