Originally Posted by
Pro Fessional
Well, that's a total of about 30% (actually 29.36%) compounded one year and seven months from now.
... Or we could walk away and still be in Section 6 negotiations then with no end in sight. The absurdity of saying "anything less than 30% is a NO vote" without any regard for the rest of the TA and considering the time value of money amazes me. To those of you making statements like that - have you considered how big of a raise it will take three or four years from now at the conclusion of prolonged Section 6 negotiations to make up for 3 or 4 years of no raises in the meantime?
Your are right and the "time value of money" of 29% in a year and a half, in itself, could be worth a quick signing by us...all things being equal.
But all things aren't equal. We know for a fact that there are numerous concessionary elements in the upcoming TA simply by what the NNP said. At the very least several hundred pilot positions eliminated over time, even assuming we don't hand more capacity to AS, DCI and the LCC's just to buff quarterly revenue in the short term (although odds are we will).
Then there is the upcoming scope sale of additional DC-9-10 replacement jets at the labor busting DCI whipsaw machine.
Does anyone really think the concessionary work rules we've seen will be exceeded by secret, hidden work rule gains they just didn't tell us about when they chose to tell us about the bad ones? Who negotiates like that?
Throw in the possible lack of an early opener/acceletated arbitration and a 3 year deal plus RLA stalling is more than enough to erase 29% with compounding inflation, yet the scope and work rule/staffing concessions are permanent. But even if there is another early opener, we're not going to get the scope we just sold back, and likely not the work rules/staffing either.
I'd rather see a strongly worded statement about how we couldn't even come close to an agreement with the company due to the serious long term concessionary mentality they had, we're done outsourcing more large RJ's and in fact must go the other way with that, and we will not fund the company's upcoming retirements with staffing concessions. Hopefully the LEC's will chock block a POS like this if thats what it ends up being.