Paddles,
The Union is selling this LOA so hard because they have sold themselves that this is a good/the best deal we can get. But with good deals like this, who needs a Union? If you read Block 6 and 11 letters, it is essentially the same boilerplate nonsense in each one. It's as if they are either all sitting in the same room writing these things or working off crib notes from the MEC,NC and/or DW.
STV is NOT a vacation!! I absolutely do NOT want to give the Company one iota of a possibility that they can send me over to either place for 90 days involuntarily. I can only imagine my wife and kids' response when I tell them,"Well gang, I gotta go on a 12 day trip while you stay here in Hong Kong. If you have any questions, call the Chief Pilot. I'm sure he'll have all the time in the world to help you out." And I already get perdiem while I'm flying a SIBA trip.
And they "wish they could have gotten more money out of the Company"??? What is the purpose of the NC? They have yet to provide the membership with the openers to these negotiations. I strongly suspect that is because there would be outright revolt among the membership if we saw how little they "squeezed" the Company for us.
And do you not care that there is no school stipend? You either do not have kids, homeschool them or they speak Cantonese or French. Outside of that, this LOA essentially forbids a LARGE group of FDX pilots fom bidding these FDAs. If "my negotiating committee speaks for me" means anything at all to you, consider the large envelope of our pilots this LOA excludes from participation..voluntarily at least.
And finally, no COLA being provided is absurd. Their talk of either"the SFS guys didn't get COLA" and/or "the COLA can cut both ways" is just outright goofy. The SFS guys have a HUGE tax break that allows them to survive without the COLA and you would be hard pressed to find a reputable international company or the US government that doesn't at least minimally protect their employees from a volatile world economy with some sort of COLA.This LOA is weak...at best. For me, the alternatives of continued SIBA or foreign pilots being used are worth pressing to test. They would have already done the foreign deal were it not for the dependability factor and the fact that NO foreign pilot would abdicate their strike option in a way that the RLA would Fedex pilots to. They NEED Fedex pilots, adhering to the RLA, to accomplish their international growth in places like China and France.