Originally Posted by
Grumble
There is only one thing that drives employee numbers, that’s demand. If there is no need for a job, it goes away, premium pay trips or not. Your heart is in the right place but at the end of the day UAL is not a charity, and they won’t keep one person more than is needed to run the operation. Same goes for pilots.
This is why we don’t fly PPU trips or volunteer one day off when there are pilots on the street. If they furlough one, then we make the demand such that we make them bring that pilot back. That’s is about the limit we have on controlling jobs... below the wing we have no influence on that.
There will be the selfish Richards out there who are only in it for themselves that will prostitute themselves out regardless of the furlough situation. They can expect to deal with the repercussions from the pilot group, and to be treated like the Richard they are.
Don’t be a Richard.
I’ve been here 25+ years, and pilots not picking up PP trips or not accepting SRM has never resulted in the company bringing back pilots before they were ready to. They would just cancel the trip, and that pilot income opportunity would be gone. Plus many pilots have been forcibly downgraded in pay, and they will want to make up for that. Everything done within the limits of the contract is fair game. If ALPA wants new rules, they can agree to them contractually with the company, otherwise its status quo.
If you are advocating taking an action against the company that is not something we have been regularly and notoriously been doing for the past 5+ years, then you can do that yourself. I will operate no differently than I have in the past, unless ALPA puts out something official. “Official” means published by the MEC. Not an individual pilot spreading his personal agenda.
If you are actually concerned with furloughees coming back then the best thing you can do to help is to make sure that the company is doing well operationally and financially so that the company will grow to a point where they need to recall furloughed pilots. Making it difficult on the company is not going to get them to act in the way you are suggesting. If we are doing poorly, we are either going to set ourselves up for a merger which, as you may have noticed, does not work out well for furloughed pilots or management will want to further shrink to become profitable.
I see no issues with making sure we are doing well financially as a company, so as to bring back our furloughed pilots as fast as possible, and if in doing so the company is being forced to pay pilots more because of their poor planning, then that its a win-win.