Originally Posted by
sailingfun
I was told that by a knowledgeable person working in contract admin. PBS alone produces zero decreases in staffing. How it is programmed is what reduces jobs for the company. You could program PBS to mimic the old line system in awards and have no gains.
The vacation changes alone were worth 500 Captains positions. That is huge. Captains used to get up to 7 weeks of vacation and the first two weeks could generate a entire month off each. Elimination of the hard cap was huge. Getting rid of bow wave was huge. If tomorrow we changed to getting paid a max of ALV only with flying above that carried into bow wave the company would need close to a 1000 pilots overnight.
Vacation, PBS, bow wave and loss of the bow wave as a whole are over 20% of the lost jobs. The remaining 4 or 5 percent is buried in tens of smaller changes.
Sailing,
You are correct. However I know that you understand that we went to PBS in the first place with the
understanding that it would be implemented along with elimination of bow wave, trip conflicts, and the like.
In fact it wasn't so much the company told us "we need PBS" as it was "we can no longer afford trips touching, carryover conflicts, etc" and it was determined that PBS was the best avenue to deal with that going forward. In fact I can't think of a single airline that went from LOT bidding to PBS, but still kept all the old LOT provisions that resulted in so much trip conflicts and pilots getting paid for not working. What would be the point in the first place? That would be like trading in your old gas guzzler truck for a much smaller car, but then going out of your way to find a gas guzzling small sedan--the entire purpose is defeated in the first place.