Originally Posted by
Alan Shore
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you. Are you saying that you'd rather increase hourly rates than become less productive? Isn't the corollary to that being willing to trade some current productivity for higher pay rates too?
Whoa whoa whoa, back up the truck here. You just made a huge leap in this discussion. All I was saying is that we have a current level of manning. In order to keep from having trips broken up, or OOB DHers from covering trips, manning will have to go up. The result of that will have to be less flying and a W2 cut. I guess I have adjusted my life to a certain level of flying each month, and cutting that without a corresponding increase in pay is not worth it to me in the confines of this discussion. So right there, we are going to have to get a
bigger hourly pay increase than we would have otherwise to get to the same W2.
Originally Posted by
Alan Shore
Realize that there is a huge balancing act here. In LOA 46, we traded productivity by giving up the cap, etc. so that we would not have to take as big a pay cut. The upside was that those who wanted to could fly more, thereby making up some of the W2 loss. The downside was that upgraded slowed, potentially offsetting some or all of that W2 gain.
I've never run the numbers, so I don't know whether it's better to sell productivity and accept the slower upgrade to higher paying equipment in return for higher pay rates than one would otherwise have had vs. keeping (or buying back) productivity for quicker upgrades but having lower pay rates overall.
I believe we saw that effect specifically when the company thought they could run the airline on 300 newhires per year, but quickly realized they needed more just to keep afloat of the staffing formula. As it is, some categories are right at the minimum, which means that they cannot add so much as a minute of credit time to the bid package with violating the PWA.
I don't want a cap. I want more money to do the flying I have become accustomed to. There is no way that you can get the kind of pay increase you are talking about having to get to both institute a cap, hire more pilots to (essentially) overstaff each category and equal the W2 I would get without all the fluff. It's just math. Remember, the pot of money is only so big, and the company doesn't care how we allocate it, right? All these things being talked about will cut the pie into more slices. A 10% increase in hourly rates and a 12% decrease in flying is a W2 paycut.
The slower upgrade argument is a thing of the past too. Any of this would be minute, and unnoticed.