Originally Posted by
Ottolillienthal
USSERA says employees who take military leave will not suffer for periods of time they are on military leave......lots of verbage, but short answer is, if you have one employee who receives a benefit of employment as a function of his longevity, or a period of service, then so will a military employee.
So, military guys continue to accrue seniority even while activated, or deployed. All benefits of employment attached to "longevity", "seniority" or periods of service that they were constructively present for shall not count against them.
Otto, I'm not an expert on USSERA, since I never took orders over a month and never had any of the problems getting mil leave, etc. that seem to have become all too prevalent over the last half dozen years. However, my recollection is you lose many of your benefits (medical for example) on extended mil leave.
How can a rep on association leave have 48 good months, and not a military member?
Who was on leave?
CAL MEC thinks if they comply with federal law, they are taking away from others who are not. So, instead of complying with the law, they just ignore it. They also ignore their own military laison committee and military guard members on the MEC. But, UAL MEC did not do what the CAL MEC did. I wonder why/why not?
There were two benefits I saw to the method CALALPA used. First, the WB pilots got a much larger hourly rate increase than the 737/757 pilots. That would have led to much larger retro for the WB pilots without the time in service (or whatever you want to call it) component. Second, it reduced the windfall to those who VJMed and maximized their pay at the expense of the rest of us. As you said, had we gone straight "retro" the mil leave pilots wouldn't have gotten any retro anyway.