Originally Posted by
Splash
Good post! I appreciate your thoughtful response. I disagree with your lack of faith in ALPA, but I accept it as a sincere assessment.
Personally, I believe bankruptcy DID represent a "reset", if not of wage rates, than of our shifting of priorities. I don't think any of us like our earnings to be as vulnerable as they proved to be in the period following 9/11, so the shift has been to make our PWA less vulnerable. Like it or not, we have the most to lose when seismic upheavals alter our industry. The pilot groups that weathered the upheavals the best (meaning with the least amount of impact on their earnings), had achieved their gains incrementally…and weren't well above the industry averages. They also tended to be at companies that had used an incremental strategy to grow and develop their networks.
I agree with you that we have good management. The wary part of me that doesn't want to revisit the chaos of the previous decade appreciates their conservative strategy. I appreciate that same strategy from our union.
Surrender monkey, spineless, Moak disciple, not willing to fight for what's important.
(Now that I got THAT off my chest, Herkflyr.
)
Disregard the above sentence... I'm just pulling Herkflyr's chain! Here's my concern with what you said:
It sounds a little to me like you're saying we should keep our earnings from being too much so they're not "vulnerable." Given the severity of the cuts we took 10 years ago and how little progress we've made in recovering that buying power, I don't think that's a particularly applicable concern to our situation.
I also disagree with your assessment (at least I think this is what you're saying) that the gains we had with C2K were not "incremental" and were well above the industry average. If you will recall, C2K put us just barely above United and American at the time. No doubt we were on top, but just barely. We certainly weren't "well above the industry averages." Also, if you take a look at 1986 pay rates for example, C2K basically just restored us to that buying power after taking a relatively small pay cut in the mid 1990's with the contract affectionately referred to as "POS96." Incremental gains and a small pay restoration (MUCH smaller than what would be required today for restoration) are what produced C2K rates.
And I don't think we should be making any apologies for insisting that our pay be restored to this level. Especially given the completely different situation in which we find ourselves today with our company leading the way making multiple billions in profits and the industry restructured in a way that should facilitate more of that going forward. It is COMPLETELY inappropriate that we are being compensated at a level of buying power WORSE than what we had after taking a 32.5% pay cut in a desperate, futile attempt to save our company from bankruptcy. It seems to me that any reasonable person should be able to see that.
I fully realize that going to the company and insisting on anything like that is going to ruffle some feathers. For 10 years, we've given our management every reason to believe we've accepted bankruptcy as a reset and that we do not expect anything like restoration. "Labor risk is off the table"... I'm sure I saw that quote somewhere!
They're not going to like finding out that was one big misunderstanding, but so be it. It needs to be rectified. Chalk it up to a really bad strategic plan on our part. I expect my representation to be advocating restoration and trying to put together a plan to achieve it. I do NOT expect my representation to be accepting on my behalf a lower value for my career and then working to lower everybody's expectations to accept this lower value. It's definitely going to be harder now that we've had a full decade of the latter.