To play devil's advocate, because your post just invites it:
Easy. First SWAPA . They obviously never entered BK.
Because they never took an attitude of "burn the house down until we get the moon and then some." Their attitude was always "work hard, play hard, be happy with reasonable compensation that built up modestly every year."
They did not hand over their retirement as we did
Because they never HAD traditional retirement to begin with! It is easy for a company to avoid filing for BK so as to avoid paying crippling DB payouts...when the company never had a DB to fund in the first place!
And never took the haircut in work rules and compensation as we did.
Sure they did...for 30 f'ckin years! But as a buddy of mine at SWA once told me, while legacy pilots spent all their time figuring out how to turn one week of vacation into three weeks off, and all sorts of other ways to get paid for NOT working, SWA guys were working hard and enabling a prosperous company that could afford a decades-long string of modest, but consistent pay raises.
Pointing to them and saying that this is a sound strategy is disingenuous. Apples to oranges.
I disagree.
After contract C2K, SWAPA was aggressively agitating for like compensation on their next contract. 9/11 happened and they stayed with the incremental gains.
And were pretty happy to stay with said incremental gains.
For that reason (getting rid of 3B6) but primarily due to work rule changes, changes to reserve, and pbs, I voted no.
Please get your facts straight. PBS wasn't even thought of until the avoid-BK LOA 46 in 2004. It had nothing to do with C2K. You claim reserve got worse with C2K? I claim it got a whole lot better, as the 12 hour long call window didn't exist until then, and ALL reserves got to sit two separate short call windows...EVERY single on call day prior to C2K.
Sure the $$$ was fantastic. But being relatively junior then, the work rules impacted my young family more profoundly than the $$$ enhanced it. Remember, current pay rates did not impact retirement then unless you were in your final 3 years.
See above. Why don't you just admit that you are a "just say no" sort who not only has never seen an agreement that he would vote yes on, but doesn't every WANT to see such an agreement. Why? Because voting NO is so much easier, and in a way almost fun.
And to answer your final question, it will be good enough once we have unity and make a stand to obtain compensation that at least exceeds the rate of inflation. 4-8-3-3 does not do it.
More generic blah blah. Define "unity" please. With 4-8-3-3 you mean 13-3-3 right? After all the "4" came six months prior to the amenable date and the "8" on the date. Other pilot groups wish they had such problems.