Originally Posted by
Bluedriver
In this environment, MANAGEMENT needs 1st year pay to increase. They may bluff and say you need to negotiate for 1st year pay increases, but in this environment MANAGEMENT needs it. Don't waste negotiating capital on it as they won't have any choice but to ultimately include a competitive 1st year pay in their "last, best offer".
Originally Posted by
Bluedriver
Here's the things about me, I'm not the guy you can bully into "not bringing something up" for fear of YOUR rebuttal. Your words and analysis of the situation are basic and inaccurate, at best.
Did Frontier raise 1st year pay out of "caring and love"? Yes or no? Was "caring and love" the reason? Yes or no?
And JB 1st year pay isn't standard, it's basically industry leading. Try and be accurate and precise when you speak to me.
You mistake the difference between what I desire as a final outcome, and the strategy I would employ to get there. Ultimately it is the COMPANY'S responsibility to staff the airline. It is the COMPANY'S responsibility to attract and retain new pilots. Day 1 of section 6 the company would LOVE for you to fix THEIR attraction and retention problem by offering up a reduction in expectations for the other 95%+ of the pilot group to finance an increase to year 1 pay. You would be their wet dream. In this environment where they can't staff the company, which is THEIR responsibility, and their business plans and promises to Wall Street don't work without staffing the company, you make it clear to them that you will give up NOTHING from your expectations for the other 95%+ of the pilot group. No robbing Peter to pay Paul on this one. And I guarantee you, that last, best final offer will magically have a competitive 1st year pay. That wasn't the case in the last cycle, predominantly for the ULCCs (which should tell you something about that business model), but it was for most of the rest of us, and WILL be the case this time.
So I'm going to respectfully expect you to stay the H E double-hockey-sticks away from my negotiating committee and executive council strategic planning, as you are all emotion and no situational awareness.
Originally Posted by
Bluedriver
I think you guys are all very confused.
1. Where did I ever say I didn't expect the final OUTCOME to be a great 1st year pay rate?
2. Did I not ask you all to reference JB's 1st year pay rate (industry leading) if you want to know how JetBlue management and JetBlue pilots feel about first year pilots?
You guys only hear what you want to hear.
To begin with, you wandered blindly into an old argument. No one said that B6s first year pay was not industry standard, but NKs isn’t and never had been. Your first posting was nearly a word for word duplicate of what Mayo and a few others have used for years to justify a pi$$-poor industry low first year pay and an even more pathetic training pay that advocated holding newbies (and recruiting) hostage to extracting more pay for the non-newbies. And if you look at what the OUTCOME of that strategy has been at NK, it sure as H€|| has NOT been anything approaching industry standard. It doesn’t seem to have worked all that well at F9 either, although they at least had the option to raise first year pay and management brought it up to well, still industry lagging, but not industry lagging as much as NK.
In the meantime, in a company where (preCOVID) 15% of the people were newbies every year, they were being started out at a fraction of the pay they had when they left the regionals AND YEAH, WE COULD ALL DO THE MATH AND KNEW IT WOULD BE A BETTER DEAL IN THE LONG RUN, but most thought that wasn’t the way to treat our fellow pilots and that it undermined the unity a union should have.
So before you blunder into a furball on an issue where that has long been discussed, you might want to see the results of that attitude where you are discussing it, on anNK board. THIS is where that philosophy got us here:
Training Pay: $1750 per month
no insurance initially while training
First year pay currently up to $61 a month w 72 hr guarantee on reserve although preCOVID it was still in the $50s
total before taxes about $ 43,500 today.
So don’t blame the junior pilots here for believing that your philosophy of not “wasting” leverage on new pilots is as self evident to them as it seems to be to you, because their experience with the results of that philosophy is very different than yours. If you are too ignorant or arrogant to understand that, that’s on you, not on them.