Originally Posted by
Softheborder
$300,000 “plus up” may be the current ask..but in the 2019 opener it was $1,000,000 AND they wanted to fund it by drastically reducing the DC % for newhires for years. Think it couldn’t happen??? It’s EXACTLY what NWA did to their Junior Pilots in bankruptcy. The Junior/Newhires got 2-3% DC while those Senior “more deserving I put in my dues super premium widebody Captains”…raking in 18-20% DC. Thankfully must of the deadzoners took the VEOP. I agree with the OP….why are we wasting negotiating capital on a MCBP min balance. I place most of the blame for the Company laughing us out of room and walking out squarely on the minority Deadzoners who were VERY organized, active and controlled the MEC and drove the ask sooooo far outside the ZOR that here we are 3 years later & no contract. All this insanity about C2004 plus inflation AND 25% DC AND Lump Sum plus up….and we’ve gotten exactly nothing. 63% of all Delta pilots have never had a pay cut…we have only had pay raises….up until C2919 when the Deadzoners stopped the music….and they continue to with Full Retro blah blah blah….so the Veops can cash in. I’ll take an extra % in rates and a “signing bonus” equal to full retro and screw the Veops who have held things up and continue to do so. I’ll get excoriated for this post. The Chit Chat crowd will stroke out but I don’t GAS…
Yea, this isn't really true. Whoever told you that didn't understand the history at all. The NWA targeted DC plan (TDC) was calculated to provide an approximate 50% FAE benefit. It took a combination of your age, longevity and what your frozen DB plan was paying. Since the NWA DB plan maxed out at a 25 year benefit accrual, most of the senior dudes were maxed out and receiving very close to a 60% FAE benefit from the frozen plan, and a larger number near the 50% FAE point. Those pilots got zero from the TDC because they were already at or over the targeted amount. They even sued over it, but lost.
The TDC worked off a point system, which was a combination of age and longevity. To get a "full share", I think you had to have 40 points. There is a demographic made up of fNWA pilots who were quite young when hired and when the TDC kicked off they didn't get a fully share, and the drop off was really pretty steep. A pilot with just 2 points less than another pilot got about half the TDC money.
When the merger happened, the TDC was replaced with a flat 10% DC, so by the time the younger pilots "aged into" a full share of the TDC, it was replaced by the flat DC, which paid less.
The post-merger DC didn't really improve until 2012, and then only by 1% in 2016. Pay took a long time to recover and didn't even approach C2k rates until 2016 (not corrected for inflation). Let's not forget the market was also in the toilet from 2000 to about 2014ish with flat or even negative returns, depending on which point you look at (dot com bubble in 2000, followed by the financial crisis of 2008). Everyone looks at the DC we get now, stupid high market returns (oops, until recently) along with the pay rates, profit sharing and thinks it's golden. Money works best when you start investing early, but this whole time period for many pilots was disrupted by pay cuts. Even if you were in the market, times were tough.