Originally Posted by
Dharma
I also don't mostly. There's no magic way to exceed peers by a significant amount, for an extended period of time. You could say that future pay raises would absorb the exchange, or you could say that future pay raises may not be as big because of profit sharing. Management really doesn't care what label is on the value they transfer to us. It's all eventually wrapped up in pilot costs.
Which leads us to a second dimension often overlooked. What about the down years without profit? Now the way I've described above is of significant more value.
If you subscribe to managements view that we'll be profitable forever, why worry about any of it? If you think we might still be subject to the rise and fall of normal business cycles, exchanging the first level of PS for pay turns out to be way better.
This logic is kind of a straw man. If you think there would be down years over the life of the contract (4 years), your point would be valid. However, if EVERYONE who gets paid to estimate airlines earnings was predicting 6-10 Billion /year for the next 3 years, why would you hedge so dramatically. Literally NO ONE had Delta making anything less than 3 billion per year.
It made no sense. It was pure capitulation.