You’ll have to forgive us for being a little suspicious of a question from a freshly-created account. This is the sort of tactic that our labor relations department and some members of our management would employ.

Working at G4 is good, but here’s why: Our out and back/home every night business model greatly limits the manner in which the company can take advantage of us. If this were a regular multi-day trip sort of airline and management applied their same “contract doesn’t matter” philosophy to that situation, attrition here would be the highest in the industry. Anyone who currently works for G4 and doubts this only has to look at reserve pilot treatment, pay protection issues, TDY/VBD rental cars, TDY/VBD DH days and the childish reaction to the loss of that arbitration, no-shows being issued for nearly anything, instructor treatment, systematic payroll “glitches,” pay screwups, crew scheduling treatment, moving of reserve shifts to prevent self-release, rental car use for DHs, using DHs to keep people on duty overnight in lieu of a hotel, the fight over pay on DH days for training, VFN shenanigans...the list goes on.

Granted, there are individual situations that can be chalked up to incompetence, but these diabolical plans weren’t concocted by some hapless support department drone who was working in retail a few months ago.....they’re marching orders from our labor relations people. They want to change the status quo, create as many issues as possible in order to give themselves an advantage when it comes time for contract negotiations, bleed union resources by forcing even the most ridiculous positions to arbitration, and to mitigate the costs of the current contract. Yeah, the company loses a lot of these arbitrations, but it still costs the Union time and money dealing with an otherwise black-and-white issue when they could have been working on more significant issues.

It pains me to see the company acting in such an obtuse manner. If what they’ve been doing presently is any indication, our next contract negotiations are going to be very hard and long fought.

I’ve just reviewed F9’s pay scale. In my current position, I’d be making 10% more pay, have greatly increased retirement benefits and, without even looking at the work conditions and contract language, I can tell that both are most assuredly better....because G4’s are terrible. I know you didn’t ask about JetBlue, but the bottom of their captain payscale more than the top of G4’s.

The log and short of it: The company got a windfall contract because they were able to win over the 6-year plus pilots with good pay rates for them and now they’re taking advantage of poor language to set us up for a protracted and difficult contract fight. Right now, this company is a good place to work despite the company’s best efforts, not because of them. The out and back business model is the only saving grace.

I’m not telling to you avoid G4, but this is an important consideration.