Originally Posted by
AYLflyer
I've read your other responses and just want to say we're all in this crap together, regardless of attitudes on this and other boards. I love working here, I want JB to do well and beat the other guys. I'm a fairly junior guy and my attitude to this LOA is, for all I care, send me a WARN letter. I'd rather get furloughed than give up an inch of our scope. Scope is never for sale.
I'm also trying to look at this logically from the company point of view. If this was occurring a year ago when this first started, the odds of job loss were very, VERY high. We're only here because of government intervention/bailouts. At this point though we have a vaccine that's being distributed nationwide. Airlines are talking recovery strategies, such as increasing flyin. My buddies at other airlines are talking about hiring and places like Frontier and Allegiant are going to be running classes soon. This past recurrent here at the school house, our management was talking about wanting to hire in Q2/Q3, we're expanding our flying to new markets, and they are gung ho about going to London in 2021. We just released a new Mint experience and are marketing our ability to compete with the big guys on overseas routes. So after all of that, NOW we're going to furlough?
I wrote this in another thread but here's the furlough timeline.
60 day notice if they do it immediately. So that would put us early Spring. By late Spring the vaccines should be hitting the general public. Everyone else is ramping up flying, and we....furlough? Okay well a furlough costs the company money, and is a multi-year deal. Displacements, training etc etc, and they're going to do that right in the middle of their launch to Europe? They're going to water cannon salute a new airplane on new routes (A220) while they have pilots on the streets? I was having this discussion with a friend of mine at a legacy airline, and we both agreed that furloughing at this point, 1+ year into the pandemic would be shooting themselves in the foot based on their aggressive recovery strategy.
Also, this was originally marketed as a COVID recovery strat, but suddenly it's an up to 12yr deal. No thanks.
I agree with this. This is why I'm not worried about furlough as much as I was last year when this started. I listened to every pocket session since then and 1 theme that continues is nimble and aggressive (remember those 80 routes we annouced). And this was before AA came to us, so organic growth. Then I remember they also mentioned this is when JB do great and comes out stronger, in downturns (9/11, 2008). So JB history confirms what mgmt says.
Next, the legacies are so big it's really hard to get much bigger so they have to try to just fend off the little guys or shrink. LCCs/ULCCs has a lottt of growth left to do, this is why Spirit, Frontier etc are firing up the engines to get ready to grab market share. And our plan is furlough? Smh our little LOA failure is gonna send JB into a cash bleeding machine? Come on now. Folks saying "I looked at the big picture", did you look at the biggest picture? Cash bleeding now doesn't mean cash bleeding in August (might be a cash drip drip if that lol)