Originally Posted by
Hedley
The point is that staffing the airline is a company problem, not ours. They can fix their problems with contractual improvements or find other ways to deal with hundreds of unfilled vacancies. It’s not something to waste any time negotiating, which usually means trading something else that we want. They know what it will take to encourage upgrades. It’s their problem. Let them fix it. We should be focusing on work rule improvements, pay rates, and benefits. I’m not willing to trade those things for a company problem. If they want the problem fixed, they can fix it, but the cost shouldn’t be funded by us giving up other gains.
I don’t really get this. It’s not “fixing a company issue”, it’s making certain aspects of the job better. No amount of extra cash would get me to upgrade into reserve, but if they fixed reserve I’d happily upgrade and take the extra cash. That’s a perk for me that happens to help the company with staffing.
These are work rule, pay, benefits improvements. Unless you mean work rule, pay, and benefits improvements but only for lineholders?
Just because it benefits the company doesn’t mean it’s bad for us and vice versa. Options are good. It would be nice to make reserve more viable for people who aren’t solely motivated by money from an upgrade or WB flying. Right now we have some incredibly cushy gigs and some incredibly crummy ones. You can make the crummy ones better without making the cushy gigs suck. Reserve could be something desired, not dreaded. We could tweak it so that those that want to make money can make money being on reserve and those that want less stick time can preference not flying.
Bad reserve rules are definitely our problem. They might not be for you today, but if we find ourselves in crummy economic times down the road reserve might not “be a choice” anymore and negotiating improvements there now will pay dividends.