Originally Posted by
Purple Drank
My point was that, especially when on reserve, I work more for the extra money, and I MUST work more. Manning is tighter due to C12 concessions, making it harder (impossible during summer and most weekends) to drop trips and reserve days (my heavily utilized method of improving QOL). For me, the extra days of work are not worth the marginally higher pay.
You may call me or others a "DALPA regular" all you like, but we like to interject facts in the midst of some of your complaints, many of which just aren't true, or at best only tell half the story.
The fact is, that if you are on reserve, compared to pre-C2012...
- reserves now get the Average Daily Guarantee of 4.30 a day; I can't tell you the number of two day trips that used to pay four hours for a reserve (two duty period minimums) that now pay nine
- in fact many of those same two-days used to pay 7.15 for a regular line holder (example dhATL-MCO, layover, MCO-ATL; it paid 2 hrs for day one and 5.15 for day two); most regular lineholders would not pickup such a trip because it just wasn't worth it at 7.15.
- guess what? You rarely see those going to reserves any more (and remember they used to just pay four hours if they did) because evidently 9 hours for such an easy 2-day is sufficient for most regular guys to pick up, sparing the reserves having to fly the trip at all--but if they did, they would get the same nine hours!
- have you had a reserve month with a week or more of vacation? with our current contract you have your own personal reserve guarantee which is quite a bit less than the posted guarantee; we didn't have that prior to this contract and that makes a big difference in quality of life
- why MUST you work more? In fact with the ADG my guess is that most reserves will work less to get to the same number of credited hours. Have you heard of "rolling thunder?" If you are in a severely undermanned category, then put in a GS on your x-days, hopefully get one awarded, get paid for the trip on top of the reserve guarantee AND get your x-days back--not bad; in fact Crew Resources badly wanted to get rid of the x-day payback during our BK negotiations--ALPA refused to discuss it, though no one even credits them with anything positive like that.
Look, no one here is Pollyanna claiming that all is perfect and how could you possibly want anything else. What we are saying is that our contract, warts and all, has a lot of good elements to it, and DALPA has done a good job of getting value for the DAL pilots, one small step at a time, for several years now.
Guys like the DPA crowd and you (though I acknowledge you are not on that train) just don't seem to want to admit to any of it.