Originally Posted by
DAL 88 Driver
Well okay... But that seems to me like a pretty ineffective way of looking at it. If you lost 42% in an investment, and 10 years later you were still 34% down (which means you still need 51% to get back to even), would you think you'd made "significant progress" toward recovering the lost value of the investment? Would it boil down to you are where you are and not where you want to be? Or would you consider that maybe what you've been doing isn't working?
I doubt they'd be much smaller, if any. But even if they were... would you rather the numbers be where they are now and give up on the idea of restoration? Or would you rather see at least some effort to try and recover what was lost? What we have now is clearly not an effort to restore our profession and our careers. It's an effort to get "the most we can at every opportunity"... as defined and judged by the MEC without much regard for what the pilots they represent think. And that definition they're using is clearly much lower than restoration. The thing that really makes it bad is that we've set expectations and set the tone that we're pretty happy with our progress and that we do not expect anything like restoration going forward. That Lee Moak interview in Bloomberg/Business Week is a perfect example of what I'm talking about!
I truly hope I'm wrong, but I don't think that "conversation" (if it even takes place) will be taken seriously in 2015 either. Reference RA's quote about labor unrest being off the table and, again, Lee Moak's quotes in the Bloomberg/Business Week article. We have no credibility in terms of asking for restoration. We have a 10 year long track record demonstrating that we don't expect anything of the sort.
I don't think you can put forth an argument for the kinds of improvements it would require for restoration without including the context of where we were and where we are now. Otherwise, it just sounds completely unreasonable.
So I don't see how you can have it both ways. Either your objective is restoration, which means very large, what would normally be considered "unreasonable" increases to recover from the unreasonable cuts we took. Or you consider those unreasonable cuts to in fact be "reasonable" and to have established a new baseline from which we only seek reasonable improvements. The latter, of course, is where DALPA has been coming from and, by all indications, is continuing to go. And I've seen nothing from DALPA to indicate a change in that paradigm.
Are you familiar with the sunk cost fallacy? It's an economic concept that basically says you should make decisions about a current situation based on what you have already invested in the situation. A classic example of the sunk cost fallacy is the "double your bet" strategy in blackjack. The theory is if you double your bet after each lost hand you will eventually come back to even. The problem is it's a terrible strategy because the odds that you run out of money before winning a hand is not zero. The money a blackjack player has given the casino doesn't change his odds of winning the next hand.
Anyway, from what I can tell your entire argument for contract improvements is (paraphrasing) that you've given enough and you want some specific part of what you've given back. That is a text book example of the sunk cost fallacy.
I've seen you accuse other posters of accepting bankruptcy as a "reset". It wasn't a reset, it was just something that happened. It certainly sucked but it has very little or nothing to do with the next contract. Bankruptcy is the lost hand in the anecdote above. You can double your bet or you can play the odds with the hand you are dealt. In the case of the next contract the odds are favorable.