Originally Posted by
DR K
Prime the pump is a pretty weak argument. Do we really believe that any leftover uncovered pairings that didn’t go into secondary lines wouldn’t get traded for or R days dropped for when open time begins? Especially when we can go -12 without a makeup bank balance each month? This whole secondary system allows the company to disregard seniority rights for conveniences.
Swapa guys can also conflict vacations with secondary lines and it is a huge quality of life boost for secondary line holders. Our system is straight up pbs and it destroys our benefit of seniority, not unlike the “best fit” practice of assigning R day trips out of order. And we accept them both with a shrug because we can’t see fighting for improvements on our quality of life.
The “obviously management doesn’t want” sentence in this post quoted above can be used anywhere in our contract to justify a bad deal for the worker bees and is my entire point of our seemingly perpetual concessionary mindset. DR K
I actually agree most of what you say. What that comment means is that we can agree on many things but there is another entity we are negotiating against. In this particular situation, management doesn’t want any open time after secondaries are built. That the whole reason they want pbs. But they can’t because we won’t allow it in our contract. But unfortunately that isn’t the case with secondary lines. So until we can negotiate away their ability to use pbs in secondaries, we need to make the best of it for now. I like your idea of having a second build for pilots to bid on actual lines, which they can conflict with vacation. That will “prime the pump,” which I do believe is a thing. Although not quite as much of an issue at this place (compared to my last airline) due to the ability to drop trips. But it allows more trip trading when the window opens for pilots to continue to make their line better. The problem is that it goes against managements prime objective, cover as many trips as possible as soon as possible. It’s fundamental to any airline, moving metal. It isn’t just a dollars and cents issue. So I’m just trying to state the obstacle we have in achieving something like that. This doesn’t seem to be an issue that can be turned into something that is mutually beneficial enough to convince the other side that they should go with our idea. I hope I’m wrong. In the meantime, making the secondary bid better by replacing the current pbs with a better pbs is not something I personally am against.