Originally Posted by
Waves
Caution: Another long rant by Waves. Just be thankful you don’t have to fly with me. LOL Thanks FreightDog, but apparently you didn't read my disclaimer at the bottom. I stated that you didn't say all of those things. Also I'm not whining about how it was when I got hired either. At the time, I thought I had it pretty good too even as an SO. I was much happier than while I was in the military. Possibly a complete misinterpretation here. As I have recently said several times, I was one of many who advocated contract changes to "share the wealth" and reduce the pain for the new guys. So please don't misconstrue what I'm saying here. I would love to delve into what a very wise senior Captain once told me about this issue because it is very relevant and enlightening, but it is also so complex as to not be forum material. What I am trying to say here and not doing it very well is: Unfortunately every contract we negotiate along with every single issue is assigned a fairly rigid value by management. This is the way management must look at every contract negotiation. The values of such issues are like building blocks which determine what the company will accept. Thirty years ago, Captains were not willing to allow some/any of those building blocks (costs) to be used to protect the new guys. They were very strongly opposed to doing so. Believe it or not, in many ways they were correct. You probably stopped reading right there. Ha But then that is back to my earlier comment of which would require a ton of explaining. Lucy! I’m not trying to be elusive, but the explanation is something that is not easily typed. Does it matter now? Not really, but new guys shouldn't expect to just have the red carpet rolled out for them just because they are new. Old guys like me should not be expected to roll over and sacrifice everything for them. We are on a limited time line and our retirements have been compromised to say the least. One of the big problems with our industry is that new guys coming in for good reason don’t seem to understand past history and how the dream job was affected. Their dream job! Quite frankly, some of the Boo Hoo posts I read I just want to puke. Oh, Boo Hoo, I’m a new guy and I’m going to be frozen in category for a year. Does anyone really think that a twenty or thirty year guy like me wants to hear this after our airline upbringing? This post is probably brash, but I’m in a hurry to get it online so I can pack for my trip. The audacity of the company to give me a trip. LOL Here is the good news. I could be wrong about everything. HA HA
I think I understand the gist of this, and I might actually agree with some of it, but my trying to decipher your post is like my trying to understand "Inception" the first time through. It's like a tsunami of factually correct, albeit horribly disjointed, information.
This LOA was negotiated outside of Section 6, so your talk of contact negotiations is off topic.
Nobody expects "old guys" like you to roll over. All "young guys" (and by young I mean junior) like me expect is for you "old guys" to realize that being a new guy now is nothing like being a new guy 20 years ago. You're right in one respect. We don't have to sit sideways anymore. Rather than suffer that indignity, we get to sit forwards and watch all those Engineer jobs taxi past us RJ by RJ.....
I, for one, would be happy to sit sideways for years at NWA DC-10 pay. Alas, that's been OBA (Overcome by ALPA).