Originally Posted by TED74

Maybe a new format for survey of the membership?

A while back, there was a tool (I think on NYTimes website?) with which you could "balance the federal budget" by choosing what budgetary items you would add/subtract/change if you were king for a day.

I could envision such a tool for our use. Give each person a bucket of value (say $300M/yr or whatever the goal of contractual value increase) that DALPA expects the next contract to net the pilot group. Let them allocate that value wherever they choose...

If you want to put it all in rates with no other improvements and no concessions...go for it. If you want to get more value in rates by selling new hires out with a 3-year seat lock...here's a slider for that. Want to leave rates alone and get 7:15/day for vacation...have at it. Want to increase rates, retirement, vacation and training..that'll happen in smaller chunks unless you get some credit out of company-desired concessions X, Y or Z.

It wouldn't be hard to preemptively cost out the hypothetical changes and make this happen. We can debate whether it's actually a zero sum game or not, but in any case a voter could demonstrate his relative interest in advances (or tolerance of concessions) pretty effectively this way. And it would force people to work within a "realistic" framework in which changes to one part of the PWA can affect others quite substantially. Even if the ALPA-proposed total annual value was way off, the relative percentages / weight of effort we would convey in such a survey could be very informative.