Originally Posted by
Bucking Bar
As long as we are willing to trade in scope, management does whatever it wants. Creating "bargaining leverage" for the preferred group of union members.
There is at least a chance these are 717 replacements. They should be 20 percentage more efficient.
My bigger concern at the moment is our production balance deficit in the AF JV. Widebody scope failures have a much greater impact than medium narrowbody scope failures. Those are our jobs. I dont know why we would fight an arbitrary pay cut, but can not even write a letter protesting the deficit in our widebody flying..ve
As I posted before the union is very aware of the deficit. There is however a lot of rumors that have been posted here and on other forums that are wrong about how the deficit occurred.
Adding Alitalia to the JV via the AF bailout would have put the company out of compliance with the EASK metric. the additional Alitalia flights dropped the EASK metric into the 46 to 47 percent range. We signed a LOA to allow the Alitalia bailout (lots of political aspects involved in this) which allowed that lower EASK however gave the company 3 years with a 1 year fix period to come back into compliance with the original EASK. Essentially we said yes you can have Alitalia but you must grow our operation in the next 3 years to offset their flights. The company agreed because they planned more expansion in Europe. That goes against the forum wisdom that the pulldown in Europe is about the JV's and not the economy.
As everyone knows we did not expand in Europe with the economic collapse. Our EASK portion of the flying has remained essentially the same meaning AF/KLM have also pulled back at about the same rate. The company however did not add the additional flying percentage wise required and it appears they do not intend to do so and will be out of compliance at the end of the 36 month measuring period.
It is anticipated that this will be incorporated in the talks concerning the VA joint venture. Talk to your reps if you have thoughts on what we should ask for because of the non compliance.