Originally Posted by
pangolin
At the end of the day XJT has to be profitable to stay in business. UA wants to pay less for regional feed. If XJT can’t be profitable at the price UA wants to pay, then they won’t stay solvent. XJT’s only potentially controllable expense is payroll. There are ways to get it under control without asking concessions from the staff but they are limited. The letter was frank. I don’t think it was unreasonable given the circumstances. It’s been validated by UA as real and not just a rumor where XJT pilots take concessions and both airlines remain. XJT pilots need to make a decision. They could include language that if they are not the only 145 operator that rates snap back.
They haven't been profitable in over a decade if you believe the accounting. United basically owns XJT and it's not a publicly traded company so they really don't need to be profitable to stay in business. Whether XJT pilots agree to concessions or not, UAL is still getting cheap labor from them. Is it cheaper than C5? No, but is it worth the headache and money it will take to get C5 to the size of operation they need it to be? That's the question.
United is like a big general contractor and XJT is it's ****y little paint company that the contractor owns. In normal times, United is still making a ton of money off of XJT even if XJT is "not profitable". If they wanted to make XJT profitable they could just pay them more for the job they do, then all of the sudden the business they own 50% of (most likely all of) is profitable. Doing that would hurt the whipsaw though so it's just easier to keep XJT "unprofitable" and United just keeps making the $ on the other end.
If you actually believe that the XJT labor groups taking pay concessions is going to make or break United and that United is only doing this because they are in "survival mode" and trying to save as much cash as possible, then I have a some ocean front property in Wyoming to sell you.