Originally Posted by
palooza
Seems like the company and the pilots would mutually benefit immediately if Delta started helping new hires with initial training pay disparity with, say, United. It's quite a bit of cash to get started the first few months in Atlanta with housing cost, uniforms, per diem all on our own. I'm new, so maybe why it's on my mind, but it seems to me a fairly easy thing to adjust so Delta can keep recruits from going to Denver instead...
I agree we should make sure our next contract has much better new hire provisions; however, the company needs it and not us. Don't get me wrong, if I had to I'd happily spend negotiating capital to get improved training pay, better year 1 pay, hotels, and uniforms for new hires. In the current competitive market, this should be a company want or at worst a neutral no-cost to the pilots add-on. We start losing the new hire game to AAL and UAL because our intro package stinks, and the company will want to make it happen. We most definitely don't want to do this as an LOA outside of section 6 negotiations. I know it would sound tempting to you now as a new hire, but for the $5k or so of benefit in year 1, you could be throwing away tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in future earnings.
Short term gains are certainly nice, but in the long run this is a bad idea.