Originally Posted by ManFlex

Many things in our CBA are industry leading, the 'junior assignment' language is not one of them. We could have one sentence saying involuntary assignment of flying is prohibited. Then we could delete all of these five JA's a year restrictions, etc. No need to protect pilots from something that would be completely prohibited in the first place. Many regional airlines and all reputable, major airlines that I know of do not have involuntary junior manning. The major issue at Spirit is we've wrongly conflated the term 'junior assignment' to mean 'premium pay' and consequently we have inappropriate and illogical restrictions like starting the draft list from the most junior pilot or limiting the pilot on earning more than five premium pay trips per year. These were protections intended to protect the individual pilot from company abuse which does not occur anyway.