Originally Posted by
Adlerdriver
Actually, the best thing the company could do would be to make our secondary bidding system as good and pilot friendly as possible. We're not negotiating and the improvement process is supposed to be happening (well, should have happened quite a while ago). So, the ball's in their court and there's no zero sum involved.
They could make it the most kick-ass PBS anyone has ever seen and hope that people start warming up to it. In the meantime, at least we'll have a better secondary process. Or they could put a little lipstick on the pig we have and pretty much guarantee we'll never see it here.
I came from a regional which was purely Line bidding. And secondary lines was just a person on the other side of the computer monitor reading each pilots’ preferences (supposedly in seniority order) to build the relief lines. Management wanted to implement some software called VTO (I have no idea if it’s the same thing that is used here) and the union stepped in and suggested a specific PBS vendor instead. The PBS software, with not many enhanced PBS-specific work rules, it was eventually implemented for secondary lines and despite the relatively low quality and amount of trips to choose from compared to the trips used to make hard lines, junior Line holding pilots would bid down to use PBS in the secondary bid.
We kept hard lines and made secondary line bidding better for both sides.