Originally Posted by Beewatcher2

To understand what can go wrong with this TA you have to pretend that you are Scott Kirby. His first goal is to get pilot costs WAY down. Right now you have a situation where lineholders are averaging line values of 80-90 hours a month while tons of reserves are getting paid an average of 73-76 hours for sitting at home. If this gets ratified, he will lower all LPA’s to match the MPG of their respective tiers. He thereby has greatly increased the number of lineholders in all categories and reduced unproductive reserve pilots. Group 1 pilots get LPA’s of 60 hours or less. The reserves in this category will now have an MPG of 60.8 hours, which has reduced their pay 17%. Group 2 pilots will have their LPA’s built at 52 hours. The reserves in this category will have their MPG set at 52.7 hours, which lowers their cost by 28%. Group 3 will have their LPA’s built at 35 hours, which gets the reserve MPG down to 36.5 hours, which is a 50% reduction. Most lineholders will struggle to get their LPV higher unless they are in the very top of the category. Open flying will be the new premium time. There is a false belief that because MPG doesn’t matter much to lineholders now that it won’t matter in the post TA world. This is incorrect. There will be a lot of extra lineholders chasing very little open flying. Most lineholders will end up getting paid close to MPG. This is the TROJAN HORSE of this whole TA. As bad as reserve pilots pay is being cut, the system wide average lineholder’s pay reduction will be greater (far greater than 17%, 28%, or 50%). If the average line holder usually was flying about 80 hours per month and his pay goes to MPG his cut will be roughly 25%, 35%, or 56%. Think about that point for a moment. The furloughs (the bottom 2k) will still happen on 1 June but Scott gets to keep this "MPG flex thing" going for another 17 months. He will get very good at spreading the flying around so as to minimize overall payroll. Scott knows that even coming out of this we will be lucky to be a close to 70% and it’s going to be a long slog particularly on the international front. The 2k pilots cut on 1 June won’t be coming back until mid 2023 at the very earliest. Training costs have been avoided and the company has done much better with all this “MPG flexibility”. The 5% pay raise requires 4 consecutive quarters of profits and by then if the pilots don’t have a new contract there will be labor unrest. This might actually buy another year (stall) of negotiations. I suspect when ALPA came to the company to talk about furlough mitigation the company had this TA already written. In fact I think they wrote it in April. The “we are overstaffed by 7000 pilots” and “we will be poised for a quick rebound “was all part of the sales job. Who do you trust to be the better negotiators? If there was some real upside to the pilots on the backside (increased profit sharing, B plan contributions for profit sharing, stock options or no furloughs) I could possibly be on board but LTD was already in the next contract and we cost share a good chunk of that anyway. I think the company probably told the union this costs them more than a straight furlough but I really doubt this. Did Goldman Sachs analyze this? This buys the bottom 2k nine months and possibly saves the next thousand or so a short furlough but in the end they might have been better with a short furlough with furlough pay and a return to full pay. I hope I’m wrong but…