Originally Posted by
iFlyer
As you well know, there are unintended consequences for every action we take to modify our contract: want 5:15 for EVERY day? Oh crap - non-commutable trips!
The Company will tweak everything they can to optimize manning now that we are no longer over-manned; watch How quickly our hard-won quality-of-life gains evaporate over the next few months, as our Rotation Construction Committees are telling us: when they need all hands on deck, the Company just clears all the "nice-to-have" options out of the rotation construction algorithms, and goes for most-brutally-efficient. You may not like the results.
Similarly, although I've always liked the idea of Holiday pay, it makes us "brutally efficient", and does solve the manning problem by requiring less pilots to voluntarily fly the same schedules. Sometimes, stickiness is actually good for us, and by ensuring friction in the system, we actually retain inefficiency in the system - which means more pilots, more total pay, and more opportunity. The more I think about it, the more I'm sure that I DON'T want Holiday pay.
Our last few contract modifications have increased reserve pay, and allowed us to move our reserve off days around signicantly less-restricted than we had before, so that we now have bases that are minimum manned every day of weekends and holidays, yet have three or more times the minimum on weekdays - that's VERY inefficient for the Company, and is in fact the opposite of what they would prefer. Guess what - it's exactly that inefficiency that creates tons of opportunity for the quality of life AND earning power you wish.
New hires are frequently holding a regular line before they even can finish IOE, and with the amount of move we already have, and the likelihood of that increasing even more, within a couple of months every pilot at Delta can be senior in something, if they wish.
Inefficiency in a lot of cases is actually our friend and gives us opportunities that we don't have when we are being super-productive. Holiday pay just makes us super-productive, sometimes we just need to be saved from ourselves. Why is solving the Company's manning problem a good thing for us?
I don't for one second consider holiday pay to be specific win for the pilot group. That being said, I am actually for it.
I've only been through a few contracts here, and thus far the one theme that seems to repeat itself is by management is that they will try to tout a gain on their side as a win on our side. Holiday pay is a huge win for management in that it helps solve their manning problems over busy holiday seasons. The problem will get much worse over big holidays as staffing becomes tighter and tighter. If you through a few weather related irops on top of it, your looking at cancelations due to lack of crew system wide.
Inefficiencies are a two sided coin. I don't think we should be striving to become less efficient, but I also don't think we should be looking at ways to become more efficient. Efficiency is a managerial concern during contract negotiation, not a pilot concern. The only efficiency I personally care about is my own time/pay comparison. How much am I being compensated for my time at work?