Originally Posted by
JamesNoBrakes
As if there's no "good old boys club" with seniority? I'm not saying anything is perfect, but it would be infinitely better than what we have and allow you to take your experience and value to another airline without having to "start over" at the bottom. What you are claiming would be true if every other industry used seniority, but they don't, the opposite is largely true. Modern HR departments are very objective, they have to be to prevent lawsuits, in fact, HR is an entire profession these days. You can probably come up with a million reasons why you can't or don't want to do this, because you hope one day your number will be up to that golden international 777 job, but for the same reasons thousands of pilots will never have a chance, no matter how good, smart, proficient, or knowledgeable they are. This is about allowing the best and brightest at least the chance, rather than just making it entitlement based on when you joined. It's also about being able to take your experience and abilities somewhere else and having actually mean something.
What is your defining metric for a "promotion" aka upgrade? There is no breakout for pilots. Certainly you could have Captains do evaluations on FO's and use some type of scoring system for promotion but that would be largely subjective.
Your idea to interview for the position is not rational. Currently we are upgrading approximately 30 pilots per month. We have approximately 1700 FO's. Let's say 850 apply for the position and of those 850, 300 are chosen for an interview. Only 30 will be given the promotion. This would have to be done every month. This means that if you are an FO who meets the "promotion" requirements you'd have to ensure that you were available on the day of the interview. Given the current ops tempo, not gonna happen and consequently unfair.
The seniority system works for the purpose of upgrade. It works for the purpose of commuting. It does not work for the purpose of changing companies. If pilots could move on to a better company without having to "start over" (take a huge pay cut right up the A$$), then we would not have so much stagnation at the upper tiers of the regionals.
We, as pilots, need to cherry pick the things that are good and discard the rest. The payscale should be commensurate with experience i.e. flight time. We should not be penalized so harshly for moving to a better company or moving for a better QOL.
If Sullenberger was hired at Skywest today he'd be paid $24 / hr.