One of the things that have come out of the riots have been the "Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes" memes where a rioter does something dumb and gets instant justice like a tear gas canister to the chest. The lesson is, don't play stupid games to start with.

I wasn't here for the previous rounds of boom and bust, but it's been apparent from reading this and other boards, watching documentaries of those eras focusing on our industry, and talking with folks who were here during those times, that we engaged in the company's concession game, hoping to win something while giving what we thought was a reasonable trade off. In the end, we wound up winning stupid prizes that lasted an inexorably long time. Would we have faced those stupid prizes anyway? Maybe, but maybe we shouldn't have been playing the game to begin with as it appeared rigged against us from the start.

What the company has right now is a training throughput problem on the Guppy. If they lop off 2850 by the end of the year, they lose over 20% of their Guppy TIs. If they lop off 3900, they lose 40% of those TIs. This isn't an issue on the Bus (5%/10% respectively), nor any of the other fleets (only the 756 looks similar--5%/35%, though 756 may be on the chopping block). The company desperately wants/needs those TIs to keep working at max capacity to get through the training backlog so they can then right size the company. The longer it takes to train into our highest demand airframe (and with fewer Guppy TIs, it will take a lot longer), the longer it takes to furlough as deep as the company probably wants to go. It also takes a long lead time to create TIs, so a longer lead time/more existing TIs helps with this as well.

So the game is being set up to keep everyone on property for X amount of time at the expense of MPG cuts in a tiered fashion. Never mind that these tiers and any downgrade pay freezes during this time are designed to incentivize us to tacitly accept an A/B/C scale (something I've heard we apparently struck for many years ago). Those in the bottom tier are on the chopping block anyway, they should be happy to just be employed, right? TK is running at 100% throughout that time, and best of all for Scott Kirby, we're paying for the excess that must be maintained to make that happen. Rest assured, there will be snapback language that will assure everyone that we go back to normal on XX Jxxx, 2021. Except it won't be normal. On that snapback date, the company will have right sized and will now be able to go to 3900, or 4500, or 6000 furloughs--whatever demand looks like at that time and going forward--immediately. If you're in the top of the bottom tier or bottom of the middle tier, this should concern you greatly. It should also concern you if you're being displaced to junior equipment and thought you'd be a mid-level lineholder. You're probably looking at reserve now.

Stupid game indeed.

So what should we do? I argue, don't play at all.

If you're genuinely concerned about the bottom of the list, advocate for an ALPA-based furlough fund to provide a stipend to furloughed pilots for a period of time to soften the blow of a furlough. That would truly be pilots helping pilots. If you still think the company's tiered MPG is designed to save money while demand is low, let's condition the language with the same MPG tiers and hard LPV caps on TIs to prevent a company end run around our contractual language requiring line pilots to be TIs. That was put in place to make furloughing harder; allowing TIs to work full bore while the rest of us "share sacrifice" negates this provision of the UPA. If you feel you support a MPG cut approach due to egalitarianism, I invite you to demand revocation of any language that freezes pay after downgrade at previous equipment rates and an across the board MPG cut of 15% to eliminate the obvious and odious wedges the company is clearly trying to drive in our membership. If that makes you pause, that's fine, you're self interested like we all should be, but own it and quit hiding behind wanting to help the little guy. As I stated in the first sentence of this paragraph, there's a better way to do that in house.

Don't win stupid prizes...again.