Originally Posted by
Excargodog
Why do ten other airlines have better pay than NK without screwing over their newbies? Why should NK management worry about losing second and third year FOs when they can promptly replace them with cheaper labor?
Do you think management would worry more about losing second and third year FOs and junior CAs if they couldn’t easily replace them with new hires? New hires that they get for cheap? Classes are full. Plenty of low time FOs in CA constrained regionals willing to jump to NK for a new type and enough hours to move on. Management is using the cheap feed to beat the union at its own game.
How long must this not work to convince you it won’t work?
In the past negotiations 10 other airlines had management that valued their pilots more and chose to pay more across all longevities. Spirit’s and Frontier’s managements did not make that same decision and elected to go the cheap route. As bad as our pay is now, it was a huge increase from where we were. So if you are saying we should have negotiated higher pay in the past to not be where we are right now, then I agree, it would be better to have higher all around pay right now, but we don’t, so… Where we are now, in the present position is lower all around pay. The only other airline that is comparable to us (because they had practically identical rates) is Frontier. And what did Frontier do to 1st year pay? They didn’t wait for negotiations to start, they did it because it was helpful to attract pilots and stem attrition. What the other 10 airlines did is not relevant or comparable. The regionals are more comparable than the other majors/legacies, which was in a worse attrition problem than us. And what did all the regionals recently do to pay? Raised it dramatically and fast.
You’re looking back at what we should have done in the past, it’s not relevant and not accurate because you’re blaming a pilot group for the all around low pay instead of management.
This is not a hard concept, but you have dug in and can’t let go.