Paying pilots more is usually a good thing. But the union negotiated for the premium first come, first served window to be NOT implemented until other parts of the contract ARE implemented. If the company can just offer premium pay whenever it wants, outside of the limits of the mutually agreed upon CBA, it has NO incentive to speed up implementation of the other sections that pilots will benefit from. Furthermore, it agreed to the implementation timeline, then when they needed it sooner, they did it anyway knowing they weren't allowed to.

The company made a calculated decision that the grievance of this blatant violation will be better to deal with than a bunch of cancelations. Time will tell how it plays out. But allowing this violation to go uncontested would set a bad precedent in the "enforce the contract" phase, even if pilots benefited from it.

Last, in the CP email Mar 29th, he was clear that pairings will not be paid outside of CBA limitations. Crew services had been negotiating with pilots and making deals to fly flights/pairings for extra pay. Then when the pay doesn't show up, the pilots go to the chief pilots saying they had _____ deal with crew services and they aren't getting paid according to that deal.

"Chief Pilots will not be modifying pay to reflect any rates negotiated outside the CBA. If you are promised pay outside the CBA, we ask that you please make your Chief Pilot aware."

They couldn't be more clear. But then he turns around a few weeks later during an IROP and emails the pilot group saying they would pay everyone more to help out, outside the CBA?

Once everything else is implemented and the premium FCFS window happens, it will be fine and will be a good thing. And perhaps if the company wants 200% instead of the 150% that will exist with the premium FCFS window, they can negotiate for it next round of negotiations, or possibly in a side letter resulting from this grievance, or some other manner legal under the RLA.

Tl;dr: no, this isn't a good thing.