Originally Posted by
gloopy
This is clearly not what the rumor is about. If all you did was remove the buddy bid LCA feature, that wouldn't change anything. Guys would still bid to award employee numbers that were LCA. If you removed that, guys would write massive bids to avoid everyone that isn't an LCA. If you removed that, it may make a difference right away, but it wouldn't take long for black market networks to develop to trip specific/mirror bid that the LCA's are bidding. And all of this doesn't change the issue of pilots getting bought off trips.
No, this is not what its about. They are very obviously coming after all of it. Either in the form of recovery or outright removing the trips from what FO's can even bid to get in the first place.
We just agreed to the no recovery in exchange for a pretty huge concession of a freeze for new hires. If they want the recovery back, they can lose the freezes. Even then, recovery needs WAY more protections that it had before.
They are doing this to reduce staffing and pilot jobs, after we gave a concession to get it already. Removing trips from the pool is the absolute worst idea possible and way overshoots their concern anyway. No deal.
The new hire freeze was not the only thing we gave up to get rid of the recovery flying. When they merged the 767 domestic into the ER category, a pilot wasn't considered done with training until all TOE's were done. Now a pilot can fly domestically while waiting to finish his/her TOE's. That kept pilots from sitting at home getting paid to do nothing. That was a bigger concession than the freeze, but well worth it to get rid of recovery obligations for OE.