Originally Posted by
cactusmike
Sorry to burst your bubble but the west is not on LOA93 pay rates. Your captains have made over 20 dollars per hour LESS than I have for the last 7 years. Not to mention the extra week and a half of vacation I get per year. And the short term disability that didn't come out of my sick bank and reset every time I went back to work. And the 5+15 per day I get for sitting on the beach in Hawaii or taking a brewery tour in BOS (highly recommend the Sam Adams tour) on my long layovers. And so on, and so on. Contracts are not all about hourly wages, work rules have to be just as good or better to have a great quality of life. AWA had good work rules and we would have had a better pay rate if we had been allowed to pursue our Section 6 instead of a merger.
You could have had the MOU pay rates 6 years ago. The Kirby proposal was better than the MOU, but your negotiators pulled out after the Nicolau was awarded with almost all sections of a JCBA TA'd. USAPA voted themselves on the island and the rest is soon to be nonhistory. No pilot group in the history of aviation has shot themselves so repeatedly in the dick as has USAPA.
According to some here, the Nic was only the last straw, not the primary reason to boot ALPA and tear up an impending TA that was as good or better than the MOU. You see, the real reason USAPA was formed was to answer the loss of pension and the LOA 93 issue by creating a union specifically to torpedo the hope of a better contract and not to circumvent an undesirable arbitration outcome from a previously agreed to arbitration and one that was forced in the first place by an intransigent position.
If that claim seems absurd and illogical, congrats.........you've joined the rest of us. At the very least, those who've stood by USAPA should have the stones to admit what is common knowledge.