Originally Posted by FlyingOkra

Your short term gain is our long term loss. Too many short sighted selfish guys on this seniority list and too many cheerleaders undermining the power that we have as a unified group. Reminds me of this post from the FedEx page about Vacation Buy Backs.

"I am a little confused by your comments in the first paragraph.

You won't see VBB taken, unless you personally track it. I think many of the VBB "volunteers" counted on this to "slip under the radar". The fact that NOBODY was inversed into VBB speaks volumes.

I heard many pilots lamenting that they "couldn't hold" VBB (i.e. it went senior )! That speaks volumes about our "unity".

I don't know of an accurate way to track AVA usage, but I stumbled upon that information very frequently. Fortunately, it was often the same offenders.

Since the time that the CBA was presented for a vote, I stopped tracking the "volunteers" for VBB. To answer your question on VBB in August in the M11F, it was 29 volunteers selling back 217 days (1,302 hours). For the additional time I tracked it (March-July), there were 92 M11F volunteers selling back 767 days (4,602 hours). While we often hear the M11Fs were unified, this data doesn't confirm that (however, relatively, they were more unified than most).

Fleetwide, 865 VBB volunteers sold back over 7,000 days (42,000+ credit hours), from March thru August. The company must have been LTAO whenever the union would talk about unity! Keep in mind that the company could also see the depth of the VBB requests (I had no way of knowing how many "unfilled" requests there were). It was also interesting to see VBB offered in seats, with no takers (rare, but THANK YOU!!), but no inverse filling of the supposed need! That tells me that the company was using VBB as a unity tracking device, as well as a tool for covering up their management failures.

NOTE: 865 vacations were sold back. Some pilots were multiple "offenders", so there were about 750 unique names. A very few figured out how to sell it back "the right way" and I complement them on their ingenuity.

We had leverage for MANY months BEFORE the TA, but TOO many failed to do what many consider to be "the right thing".

For those that say we had and have LEVERAGE, you are 100% correct! For those that are obsessed by this issue, what in the he!! would it have taken to get 95%+ of this "unified group" to grow a set? Obviously the 75% unity (who knows what the actual number was, but since about 750 unique names held VBB and probably another 50% "weren't senior enough to hold it", that would be about 25% of the crew force) was not a significant enough number to get the results we deserved. The bottom line is that unless we are truly unified (95%+), nothing else really matters. Management looked past the Negotiating Committee and they had to be delighted in what they "saw".

I fail to see how a measly 24 hours of pay compensates someone for waiting 6 years for a contract, that will probably be effective for 6-10 years. Based on the pathetic unity I tracked and observed, I very reluctantly voted yes, partially because of the obvious futility in any other outcome. Had I seen true unity, I would have voted no."

I wish you the best at Delta SourGrapes.