Originally Posted by
Pineapple Guy
Which had absolutely nothing to do with your lower rates...
You kept your pension because it didn't meet the high threshold required to terminate.
Originally Posted by
Pineapple Guy
Assuming "we" is NWA ALPA, I don't know when you voted to freeze it, but the freeze didn't happen until after you entered bankruptcy.
BTW, DAL ALPA voted to soft freeze ours too, and the combination of paycut and soft freeze had the same effect as a hard freeze. It was frozen 9 months BEFORE we entered bankruptcy…..but still terminated.
I think this is probably a. "Which came first: the chicken or egg?" conversation, but I'll answer anyway. From my perspective at the time, which was a freshly bumped DC-9 captain back in the right seat of the 757; our lower pay rates had everything to do with our frozen pension. If I remember correctly, our frozen pension vote came in the fall, while the concessionary contract vote came the next year.
I can tell you that I argued until I was blue in the face with guys with multiple reasons as to why they shouldn't vote for that contract. Almost everyone fell back on the same excuse as to why they would vote for it: they wanted to protect their pensions. IMO, it's the main reason why "we" voted in those lower rates.
So, it's all in how you look at it. I didn't take his statement to imply that we kept the pension because we had lower rates, while it appears that you did. Rather, I thought he was just including the frozen pension as evidence to compare our overall compensation as compared to yours.
I guess we would have to ask him what he meant.