1) Every reserve pilot has no choice but to call crew scheduling or check crew access at the end of the trip. Remind me again how this is better than ACARS telling a pilot to call crew scheduling at the end of every trip?
2) Still 12 days off on reserve and 13 days off three times a year. Improvement? Huh?
3) Vacation day at 3:45 is a joke. Even Kasher, 17 years ago, gave us 3:50. Of course, the company took us to arbitration arguing that it was a period and not a colon (3:50 vs 3.50). Management gets another Alaska discount!
4) Signing bonus/Retro pay or whatever they want to call it is a complete slap in the face. And no annual increases past 2024 gives the company a license to steal!
5) Pay rate is a joke. It doesn’t even cover inflation. The snap-up clause sounds like it only applies to TOS CA rate. Average of 5 carriers including B6 can be a doozy. B6 gets 1.x (?) after so many hours of credit. Has that been accounted for?
6) Great! We now get an extra hour of pay if we are 4 hours late getting home. It’s better than a kick the a$$ but hardly worth the pain.
7) 0.5 to 1% increase in 401K contribution will soon be below that of our counterparts. Even the 1% snap up is not up to par since the big boys will most likely get close to 19%.
These are my initial thoughts for now. If this was 2009 or 2013, I’d say we hit it out of the park. There has been no better time than now for pilot contract negotiations. The improvements that were achieved are fairly significant but sadly, we are now on par with everyone else. Yes, our current contract sucks that bad. It’s a good start but we will be left in the dust when the “five” come out with their TAs. How about we have a snap up clause to their work rules of their new TAs? SWA and DAL both came out ahead after voting theirs down the first time. The company can afford to do better. Just my 2 cents.