Because in addition to people just working the contract to our advantage, spirit's reserve rules permitted things like a strange technique of checkerboarding reserve assignments by swapping half your schedule with another reserve pilot, basically sitting reserve every other day of the month. That effectively takes both pilots off the schedule completely for the whole month, with pay. That sort of thing doesn't help anyone and it was used by the company during mediation to justify eliminating nearly ALL reserve scheduling flexibility in the new contract, showing that it actually hurt the pilot group as a whole.

Yes it was simply "using" the contract as written, but there are an awful lot of perfectly legal things that are destructive enough to just not be done. And if they ARE done, it's used against the pilot group. I dunno how other people feel but I'm big-picture enough to resist the urge to do that sort of thing that gets me basically a month paid vacation at the expense of crapping on everyone when the next contract is negotiated.