Originally Posted by DC8DRIVER

And back in the day Atlas used to share the profit among 500 pilots instead of 1000. And back in the day gas was cheap, and planes were cheap, and we smoked cigars in the cockpit, and we loaded the cargo ourselves, and we flew open cockpit planes, in the snow, with headwinds, on both legs, sitting on a wooden crate full of coffee beans.

In the 21st century, almost every pilot group has gone to a defined contribution plan consisting of AT LEAST a 15% company contribution - with no employee match required - into a 401k account in the employee's name. Once the money is in the account, the company can not touch it. The employee then chooses the portfolio plan best suited to his or her needs. No other retirement plan comes close to the retirement security this type of plan offers. (And, no defined benefit plan is secure whether it is administered by the company, teamsters, or anybody else. Just ask a retired Delta pilot how the DB plan worked for them.)

Atlas profits will vary significantly (as you have seen) and will never be what they were "back in the day". The company can manipulate the numbers deftly, costs are higher, margins are thinner, and our contract has shaved our profit sharing plan to nothing short of a joke. So, you are correct, profit sharing is VARIABLE. So why do you insist on linking any sort of retirement plan to profits? Smarter guys than us have had this figured out for a while now, and it is a waste of our time and resources to try to reinvent this wheel.

I repeat, you will NEVER see profit sharing checks like you used to "back in the day".