Originally Posted by
flybynuts
F
1. They will pay industry standard. Not a penny more or less. Delta and American is our competition and soon he believes they will remove American from the comparison when they get done making cuts. Southwest is a different animal and we could pay their 737 rates but it would come out of wide body rates. There is money in the budget for pilot pay raises but how to spread it around is the issue. Staffing is the big hurdle. Once you get staffing the rest of the contract would go fast. If staffing requires 10% more pilots then those additional pilot costs come out of the hourly rates available. The company wants to staff efficiently and use the money for hourly rates. The union wants more bodies on the property.
Everyone seems to forget this. SWA pilots are paid the most because they are the most efficient. UAL will have X amount of dollars to pay enough pilots for the company. We can either be more efficient and make more money (like SWA), or be less efficient and make less money (like we currently do). The company is fine either way. They care about the bottom line. It is our choice which one we are more interested in.
2. We are finally going to charge more than is costs for a ticket. We are going to make a little money in the bad times and kick A** in the good times.
3. He wants the 70 seat RJ’s because of the 1st class demanded by high paying customers. He is not sure we even need 90 seat jets.
One of my favorite phrases of wisdom is to always try and understand a problem from the other person's point of view. I think everyone needs to understand this before completely shooting down the need for 70 seat jets.
5. Profit Sharing for the CAL pilots will be used as leverage at the table. (the checkairman personally thinks we will get it based on the tone of the profit sharing discussions at the meeting.)
I am all for profit sharing. I would much rather have some sort of control over how much money I would make. I think management would be more interested in paying pilots more when they are doing well, and less when the company is not doing so well. This would help discourage the work slowdowns and ****ing away of efficiency we have noticed more and more. Ask a SWA pilot how much they see this happen over there. And yet we all wonder why they make more money.