There's no way in hell that we furlough 1,750 or anywhere remotely close to that number of pilots if Gary is intending to play any offense in the market. Not to mention COVID and any mandatory quarantine. Simply no way. If we have any furloughs, it'd be a token number because Gary would be throwing a tantrum and he'd show us who's the boss. That is, if he is indeed that stupid... I doubt that he is, but I've learned not to underestimate the propensity of egomaniacs to cut their noses to spite their faces because their egos were hurt. A furlough here simply makes no sense.

But getting back to the idea of SWAPA-wide assessment to cover the furloughees min guarantee, talk about an FU to the company and SWAPA's message being simple: You can thank these middle managers and list them name by name and how they interpreted IROPS, used the "etc." to pile on the grievances clearly going against the contract, how we have 140+ grievances in the system with no desire by the company to put an even remotely reasonable dent in addressing them, and simply we won't give them anything to further erode our contract, let alone FM language, a pay cut or anything else, so we'll take care of our own and you all can GFYS'ves. You could call this the Dallas Tea Party.

Just off the top of my head, I could see a subset of our pilots who would be potentially opposed to it would be those who would get downgraded. Those guys would take a pretty big hit and any assessment would hurt them more. The upside to doing the assessment even for them is that given how our contract is structured and incentivized, they'd take a hit to QOL, but they'd still be able to pick up. Conversely, if we were to just let the furloughs go, they'd get downgraded, and there would be the immense pressure to not pick up which would likely fracture our pilot group and cause much internal strife which is something most of us don't want.

In other words, two paths: one in which we don't pay anything to take care of our furloughs and you have all the pressures on people to not fly any OT.

The other path being, you fly as much as you want, but we take care of furloughees via an assessment, so if you fly more, you pay more, but the furloughs are still taken care of.

To me, it's a no-brainer and I'd have zero qualms taking a 10% assessment to take care of the furloughees, but HELL NO to taking a pay cut by giving up our contract... but that's just me.