Originally Posted by
Herkflyr
What you state is absolutely correct....of course what you fail to mention is that in C2012 the reserve guarantee was permanently raised for all reserves, forever. Further, you did not mention that with the old system, if you had vacation, mil leave, etc., that NONE of it applied to how much the company could fly you. So if you had 7 days of vacation in a month, guess what? The company could fly you to the ALV outside of those days. If you had even more days it was even worse. Now those days count against your "personal" reserve guarantee.
The ability to fly to ALV+15 was a concession, no doubt. However there were some positives as well. And let's not even talk about how reserve was "way back when." As it is it is a fairly good system we have. That of course is category and time-of-year dependent.
I agree it was a concession but it was a fairly small one. I have never been flown to the reserve guarantee even once in 15 years (about 40% reserve).
I am sure others have been flown to the absolute limits - but probably pretty rarely.
You want to talk about concessions lets talk about 30 day summer months.
Instant 3.3% productivity gain for the company over all
12,000 + DAL Pilots, not just a "potential gain" from some of the few thousand Reserve Pilots, that was partially offset by other contractual changes.
Finally, as much as guys complain about reserve, in my opinion it is probably the only thing in our contract that has consistently gotten better since Contract 1996. Back then, besides a few outliers, reserve was pretty much flown by the junior 20% of guys in every category - now reserve is spread throughout most categories - ask yourself why?
Scoop