Originally Posted by
Mitch Rapp05
Are you saying it is reasonable to expect someone not employed by United to displace or jump ahead of a current United employee? How can someone not employed with a company expect to have any expectations with that company, much less better expectations than a person currently employed with that company?
Again, as rough as it may sound, furloughs are FORMER employees of United and have as much career expectations as Joe Pilot at Express whose Dad is a chief pilot.
To answer your question, yes it is reasonable. The UAL furloughees have a vesting. They were identified by UAL management to eventually be the senior pilots at UAL through the normal process of age attrition. Absent a merger, no one on earth would be entitled to sit in the UAL pilot seats 20 or 30 years from now. So, if you thought for a moment this entitlement is without value, consider how many pilots would trade their current position for a slot on the UAL furlough list.
Furloughee's have a career expectation in order of seniority, a pilot that is simply unemployed does not and that is the difference between those working and those temporarily unemployed through no fault of their own. These folks have rights to a UAL job unavailable to anyone else.
Consider a world where the lists were not put together, the furloughees, in time, would return, fly a career and retire at a certain seniority, based on their age, notwithstanding other types of attrition. This is quantifiable, without too much effort a career earnings could be calculated, even for someone that is furloughed today. The arb will look at all of this and then decide, but to say furlough status predetermines a particular outcome would be ill advised.