Originally Posted by Santos Dumont

This is not about me. This is about telling people that are considering coming to Mesa that we do junior assign here. A lot of pilots here at Mesa think that because the contract says "junior available" they can always turn down a JA by simply saying "I'm not available," and that the UJA (or UJR??) code means nothing. I personally think it's a naive way of thinking. Do you really think that's how the company thinks it is supposed to work? Then why they even bothered to put junior assignment language in the contract? And what exactly a "placeholder" is? Why do you think they want to track down how many times you have refused to be junior assigned?

Now, in four years I have only been officially junior assigned two or three times. All while on reserve. So it's not something that happens often, but it happens. It's in our contract.

ALPA sent out an email talking about PRIA 7 months ago and they mention that in addition to the usual stuff...

"Some pilots' personnel files may contain nonstandard documents, such as:

Disciplinary letters
Reliability letters
Training Review Board letters"

I believe that too many UJA/UJR (however its called) could potentially get you a disciplinary or a reliability letter. And remember, if the company is really desperate and a pilot is being a jerk, they can easily get back at you and turn an UJR into an UFW. It's as easy as saying, "you seem pretty available to us (no GLD, no SIC, and no FAT, and we are talking to you), you have been notified of additional flying, be there ."

Done.