What boggles my mind is that over the past couple years the biggest issues I can recall that SAPA and the pilot group got involved in were:
• Should we switch from annual to quarterly vacation bidding? Lots of discussions, a pilot poll, a SAPA vote, etc. All conducted very publicly.
• Should we keep the monthly trip bidding window at 7 days, or shorten it to 5? Again, lots of discussions, a poll, etc etc.
In comparison to starting a war with UAL over our jumpseats, the above 2 issues are, shall we say, inconsequential. Yet we had plenty of pilot input, as was right and proper. In this situation? We just get handed a communique that tells us "This is how it is, this is what we expect you to do."
And *utter silence* from the company. This is what's most puzzling to me. Our management does *a lot* of communicating to the pilot group about everything from latency to mustache dimensions. Yet, crickets.