Originally Posted by
LandGreen
This thought process is toxic. We deserve better pay rates and I’m sick of of these idiotic excuses that our group comes up with to justify their happiness with a career at Spirit. Our QOL is pretty good, the red/green system is great, but that doesn’t mean that every other major and legacy carrier (that are getting paid far more than us I’ll add) don’t have a great QOL too. In fact, friends all over the industry have it much better than us in many different QOL categories. I’ll list them if someone wants to dispute it.
Think about this- a 5 year Spirit captain is getting paid $53 less per hour than a United 5 year airbus captain. At our min reserve guarantee of 72 hours (which is also below industry average) is $3,816 per month and nearly $46,000 per year. You like to work a little extra and credit 85 hours per month? That’s now a pay difference of $4,505 per month and $54,000 per year. Are you really willing to die on the “we have the best QOL in the industry” hill with the rest of the cheerleaders at this cost?
We have the lowest CASM of any airline running the 320s and Spirit loves to brag about it during their investor calls. Management wants to grow us to 300 airplanes and 5,000 pilots by 2027, and bigger beyond that. Put on your big boy pants and demand industry standard pay when negation season comes around. Wouldn’t you rather brag about our great QOL and pay while your sitting in United’s jump seat?
The way I see it, take UPS for instance. Read the book Big Brown (almost required if you apply) and they talk about how no-frills the entire operation is. So they say “Here’s industry leading pay and benefits, now don’t cry if the equipment isn’t shiny new, if you have to commute to Alaska, if you fly all night, if we stick you in a marginal tier hotel, etc.”
So if we want to hang our hat on being the “We make less, but sooo much QOL” airline, then we better have unparalleled quality of life. Whatever the ULCC equivalent of flying a 777 twice a month to Paris and still beating guarantee is. The kind of life that a pilot will trade a million or two dollars over the course of a career to have.
Anything less than that and we are just a bargain.