Originally Posted by
Baron50
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.
A furloughed pilot has no job at United, just a promise that IF and WHEN United begins to hire again they will get first choice to return (in seniority order). Potential or hypothetical makes not a recall. For example, just because United has "x" amount of pilots slated for retirement doesn't automatically mean that the furloughed pilot will eventually be needed to replace him (see Age 65 or mgt. could simply not replace the retired pilot and shrink the airline <-- a very real possibility).
"Absent" a merger, a return to the UAL list is NO given. Many ASSUMPTIONS must have occurred before ONE l-UAL pilot would have been recalled to a "non-merged" UAL. To now assume that said ASSUMPTIONS would have become "definite" sufficient enough to place a currently unemployed pilot in front of an employed pilot is unreasonable.