Originally Posted by
Oletimer
After the merger the decision was made NOT to lead, but to follow. Management figured it would be TOO HARD to lead the industry, so they decided to try and place 2nd or 3rd. Just like a horse race, win, place, or show. You still win. Because of this stragegy you see management lag in other areas as well. We will never win or lead. just lag or follow.
Collective bargaining is the same strategy. Management does not want to set the price of a pilot. Once they know what the price is they will adapt.
We can play leap frog effectively if we have the right mindset. You can't fight city hall. So the MEC would be wise to recognize the strategy and simply play leap frog better and better. Delta plus. AA plus, SWA plus. Whatever.
They have SWA guppy captains making 450K plus a year. RIGHT NOW. That is the truth. I bet they got guys making more. I just know a guy and looked at his W-2. Seems like he didn't even work that hard. SWA is flying guppies and they are a LCC and they are smashing it! I'll layover in Elpaso for the rest of my career if I can make that coin.
BUT...WE WILL NEVER lead the pack. Our best course of action is to "draft" like a race car driver behind the leaders and hope to make incremental gains. Delta plus, etc., is a very viable and cost effective strategy. It gives us more leverage and is way more effective than doing all the heavy lifting ourselves.
You got punk'd BIG TIME!!
Do you read your contract comparisons? Let me help you out. 12 year SWA captain rate is 238 TFP and line guarantee for a 31 day month is 89. = $254k/ year. All the lines pay the same now. Throw in a little vacation overlap. There is almost no open time and even less premium flying. $285k a year for flying your line.
We have a very tiny group of players in cartels who still carry around their W-2's from our retro pay contract year because as usual we went 4 years past amendable date so 4 years of retro on it. . Braggadociosly lying about our pay is part of their genetic structure for some reason, perhaps as a device to make up for other insecurities and inadequacies.
So I'm really sorry... sincerely. I wish that we had raised the bar (for once) but maybe we will at least maintain our own lagging bar in this black swan event as we did after 9/11. Hopefully that won't need to happen. Speaking of 9/11, remember right before 9/11 we were 39 percent below industry average narrow body pay.
Remember too, that we just got a B fund! We pay for our own parking. We have no long call reserve. I could go on and on and on.
Good luck to all my UAL brothers and sisters. Looking from the outside one of the positives I see is that solid retirement curve over there. The other is that your union and pilot group really have fairly consistently raised the bar and stood the ground. Thank You.