Originally Posted by
Mesabah
I had a Delta jumpseater on almost all my flights the last few days, asked what they thought. The vote is going to be close, I would say it depends on the ability of ALPA to sell it. Which, on that fact alone, should be a no vote.
While we should be concrned with the MEC spin machine, the TA really only has one positive and that's money. A raise that's significantly paid for by deep cuts in other areas, with a few minor positives sprinkled in here or there for effect, like 15 minutes of vacation pay per day, but no credit! LOL!
This TA is so embedded with deeply concessionary items that it will take some time to overcome the quick sugar high of section 3 pay tables. Factoring out the PS reduction, this is an 8/0/4/3 raise, but even that doesn't include the massive concessions all around. There are numerous items that are worth a percent or two of pay, and some that could devastate the entire gains of the contract, like foreign alter egos with just one man's blessing.
So 8/0/4/3 could easily become 3/-5/-1/-2 if we lose just 5% earnings with a combination of foreign alter egos, E190's and even more 737's to replace higher paying equipment, massive loss of marketshare to AF/KLM while our share degrades to lower paying equipment, massive sick leave harassment and likely many "hostages" taken by the company to further intimidate the masses, lost jobs from the higher TLV, lost jobs from reserves being available early AM on day one again, lost jobs from 75% of OE trips vanishing from the bid and the tricke down effect of that, the effective end of the soft "hammer" we have WRT the pay review with UAL/AA, etc.
This could EASILY become a cost negative TA for us even though our rates do go up.
I say we give the company 100M back as a gesture of good will, and accept only 1.0B in additional value over the life of the agreement and put it into payrates alone. I don't know what ?/?/?/? that would be, but I'm willing to let those numbers fall where they may, keep current book, put the rest in pay rates and gift 100 million back to the company.
They wouldn't possibly have a problem with that, would they? I mean, Shirley the numbers were all costed out 100% correct, right, and Shirley they would *never* do any of the worst case things, right? Right?