Originally Posted by
Sink r8
I have no idea what ALPA expected, but the language that was fine-tuned over several administrations certainly planned for it. Which contradicts your assertion that any "guys" simply "stumbled upon it". I think that was the point that started this exchange, and it's not valid.
I will agree that I didn't have an exact sense of how much it would pay, exactly, just that it would have to be big, because we gave so much.
We also were dealing with expensive fuel that looked to be going up endlessly, so much more than 20? Probably not.
Of course, I have no idea how long fuel will stay relatively suppressed.
Personally, I never would have expected or predicted profit sharing to be as successful as it has been. Airline profits historically haven't been anywhere near where they have been recently. When the profit sharing was included in the contract, honestly, for me it was a meh, whatever, thing.
I never mentally correlated profit sharing potential to what was taken from us. I, instead, looked at the company's financial restructuring as a negative...reinventing itself as a LCC with the attendant pay and benefits.
So, for me, potential profit sharing upside was not something I ever thought would be a BIG benefit.
As to stock price, I saw the upside. However, the upside was more tied to debt pay down and the company's listing on the S&P, among other factors. However, I did not see the same upside for either UAL or AA for the same reasons. I frankly thought due to listing on the S&P, we would significantly decouple from the airline/transportation indexes and be more tied to the S&P index...mostly because of the influence of ETFs in the trading marketplace (sector investing). This may sound contradictory, but I put us in the S&P sector and not in the transport sector. The truth, in retrospect is that we are still in both.
Bottom line though, PS was never something I thought would be so significant. Now that it is, the only thing I would consider trading any of it for would be for the company to fill up my 401k to the 415c limit...and that is only a portion of profit sharing, not all of it...maybe. Pay rates are a separate issue entirely.
As far as correlating PS to stock price, there certainly is some correlation. It isn't a direct correlation though. I haven't done a regression analysis on it and I don't think you have to, it is intuitive. However, there is some correlation.