Originally Posted by
bajthejino
You said the union has a history of "advocating for its members", so I asked a question that seems to really get under the skin of ABX'ers.
The majority was not interested in home basing, so the union didn't pursue it. And advocating for the membership goes beyond contract negotiations.
Its like they don't want to remain competitive with other freight outfits that want to attract and retain talent.
I don't know why home basing is somehow considered the gold standard in ACMI. If you live near your domicile, home basing has no value. If you live in a DHL or Amazon city where you don't have to shlep your bags through airports and sit in row 34 with the hoi polloi on a two-leg commercial into position, but instead make one call and walk onto an airplane that might even be operated by your own company for the trip to CVG, home basing has minimal value.
Its kina funny to me, so I guess I'm being a jerk by doing it.
Yeah, pretty much. You'll fit in great at ATI.
I jest (mostly).
Actually, on those occasions when I have commuted on ATI, I've found ATI pilots to be OK, the one exception being the guy who has a habit of refusing the jumpseat to ABX pilots because he can't get over stupid things that were done and said by an ABX pilot who retired years ago. There were a few who acted like they would rather I wasn't there, but it has been very few.
It's like another guy that was bragging about how hard it was to get through their training years ago, bragging about hiring people that couldn't make it through, and then relishing the fact they were fired, as if it was some high mark of the industry. But now, according to this person, any redtodd can get hired and they pass them through, as if they aren't being held to FAA standards.
You haven't heard the stories about the Bad Old Days of what they called "The Aryan Brotherhood", where you would be failed for any minor thing, and not surviving the probationary year was a common occurrence. Passing training and getting to the second year was a real accomplishment.
More recently, since the training department became more reasonable and hiring pilots with significant experience got more difficult, we were just happy that the training department and the check airmen on the line tried to maintain some kind of standards even as there was pressure to fill seats. There are stories. I saw at least one of them first-hand.
Should they all have been passed anyway? Many of them were hired by other ACMI carriers after leaving ABX. Make of that what you will. And everybody has seen what happens when you disregard the warning signs and just shuffle people through to fill a seat. So if the ABX training department is filtering out those who should find a different way to make a living, I'm all for it.
I don't think they're just passing everyone through now, but there are a lot more opportunities being given than there used to be. I'm seeing a lot of extra sim sessions in initial training. IOE used to be 25 hours. It has been expanded to 50. Some have gone well beyond that.
"extracting the value of home basing in other ways"-which is to say you got what exactly? The price of those tickets directly deposited into your retirement or 75% of said money added onto your checks each pay period-or got nothing and then talked excrement for years about outfits that were home based?
For retirement, ABX gets 5% direct plus a 100% match up to 3.5%. ATI gets 3.5% plus a 50% match up to 5%. So ABX gets 8.5% from the company for a 3.5% contribution, while ATI gets 6% for a 5% contribution.
We dropped 7 work days per year in our new contract, from 204 down to 197. And that is 11 fewer days per year than home-based ATI. Those days have a value, and we're doing that with the same minimum pay guarantee as ATI on an annual basis - 780 hours per year (they do 60 x 13, while we do 65 x 12) - at the same pay rate.
Blocks that begin or end with a commercial deadhead can now be done from or to the crewmember's home instead of CVG at the crewmember's request. That used to be possible, but it was at the discretion of the travel coordinator, and the cost of the ticket had to be equal to or less than what it cost for the ticket from or to CVG.
I make comparisons to ATI for a reason, namely that their 2018 CBA formed the cost structure into which we were told our CBA must fit. We are pay matched with ATI (and you can bet that wasn't an accident) so direct comparisons are easily made.