Originally Posted by
baseball
You say you're not bashing military pilots, but then...you seem to do it.
Not only do we have pilots on MLLV, but we have dispatchers, mechanics, flight attendants, agents, you name it. The entire corporation has to deal with it in all departments. Also, all of corporate America has to deal with it from Jiffylube to Walmart to Delta to American to JetBlue to Southwest. it is what it is.
There was a determination by the National Command Authority back in the 1980's to shift the burden of national defense to citizen soldiers and to have the states as well as corporate America shoulder more of the burden.
I guess you could dig up Reagan's corpse and both chambers of congress and moan and groan to them about it, but it's the cost of doing business today and it's how we will fight wars in the today and in the future.
The same rules apply to all players, to include state and local governments and police forces and fire, EMS, etc. I think I have made my point fairly clear.
We have a former MEC Chair at Continental who went on a 21 year MLLV. So what. A 3 year MLLV is not big deal. And yes, putting in MLLV inside of 24 hours may be an inconvenience. if it was, the company would staff more reserves. Pop up taskings happen. The guard/reserve continues to do more with less. It's called "military necessity." if a dude or dudet took a 3 year MLLV so what. Nothing you say, or purport to say, or insinuate, or hint at is going to change any of that.
The more the company does to pee off the pilots the more mllv gets dropped. PBS is what it is. Pilots will drop MLLV after they see their PBS award and decide what they can and can't do.
I can see why you are thinking I am being anti MIL as it is harder to convey tones on an internet page but i can promise that is not my intent. if we were having this conversation F2F it would be easier. my comment was more aimed at the fact that USERRA allows people who want to abuse the system the chance to do so without any way for the company to identify abuse. it also was in response to someone saying that mil leave creates 0 drag for the company, which was why i gave those examples
while every company in the US has to deal with USERRA i would think airlines see it more than most. simple reasoning; about 35-50% of new hire pilots at most airlines are military trained pilots. i have 0 knowledge of what % of those are guard/ reserve but i would guess half of those are either guard from the start or finishing out their 20 in the guard/reserves. so 18-25 %, give or take, of your newhire workforce is in this catagory. i doubt many other companys can say the same.
if you see no issues with a person taking a job when the have no plans to actually do the civilian job they are applying for all while forcing that company to put 10s of thousands of dollars into an account for that individual then i am not going to change your mind.
i understand that the government is shifting towards guard/reserve to save money and honestly this makes alot of sense financially. I also understand that most guard/reserve folks are caught between 2 very demanding jobs and often times the only real loser is their families. but at the end of the day the way it is used by some for things like
-getting specific days off their senority could not hold.
- getting out of undesirable trips.
- getting a sen# while still planning to spend years on AGR status to get a 20 year retirement.
you can see why people whom it is not directly benefiting would call it into question.
we all know USERRA wont change because ,like you said, it places alot of the financial burden on companies and not the government.