Originally Posted by
eaglefly
Just a thought, but shouldn't the proposals in play dictate the potential methodology considerations for your segment of pilots, especially that by your own committee? To wit, when does your longevity component start.......when you could have attended new-hire indoc or when you did attend new-hire indoc ?
On the LAA side, a thousand furloughees chose to exercise their contractual right to defer recall because they could and in their understanding, it too didn't matter. The AE flows weren't even given a choice of attending their assigned indoc class, others decided that for them for their benefit, not the flows.
This has been touched upon by others commenting recently. At LUS, they hired you into an indoc class. There was no pool. It was possible to defer, but that was something someone had to work out when called.
Once at indoc, seniority started on that day (as did your pay anniversary), and seniority within the class was further defined by age. The older, the more senior.
On day one, they passed out a sheet that had base assignments and class dates. Since seniority was already established, the class date one chose didn't matter. In fact, it was fairly common that all things being equal, the more senior guys in the class often chose the later class dates, since pay was guaranteed at 85 hours in training and that often gave people 1-2 weeks off in between indoc and the start of ground school with pay.
Fast-forward two years, and now APA is hinting that they would like to apply the OCC (LAA) model of determining seniority retroactively to all pilots hired after the POR (i.e., after December 9, 2013). So the guys who were hired at LUS and wound up being more senior in their class (like myself), who exercised that seniority to pick a base and/or class date that gave them time off or gave them a base they wanted, will now be penalized...all due to a contract that didn't exist at the time.
I can see how there's some legal authority to do that to people hired after the JCBA (and it still sucks), but I don't see how that's legal to retroactively apply that standard to a group of people that had absolutely zero expectation of said process being applied to them...in fact, during indoc, the training department stated that new hire seniority dates would likely be adjusted to DOH for everyone, rather than the archaic and overly complicated OCC system.