Originally Posted by Roy Biggins

The fact is they don’t need a deal worse than pilots right now. There’s a limit to what they’re going to spend on this short term extension. This deal alone costs the company 2-3% percent in revenue earnings per year according to our union. For a company that isn’t even currently turning a profit and won’t for some time to come. Myth 2 is we’ll be under this for 4-5 years. Yea ok, you guys keep regurgitating the same stupid bullish!t to make your bravado sound better. We’ll start negotiating the JCBA next spring. So a year after this proposed TA would become effective. Should the DOJ approve this, the company needs to integrate both airlines as quickly as possible. It’s cost them a fortune to have to keep operating as 2 separate airlines. A realistic timeline is 2-3 years before we have a JCBA.
Let’s say we send this back, what’s that do to our timeline? I can promise you at least a few reps will resign, so they’ll need replaced. Months more negotiations with the company at best. At some point, how do you know the company won’t just pull the offer and say we’ll just operate lean until the JCBA?? How do you know that’s not a possibility? Again, there’s a limit to what we can squeeze before it makes no sense for them. Imo, we’re leaving money on the table by stretching out this timeline…it’s certainly a risk. In the meantime, who has a deal? Alaska. We jump them significantly straight away and they’ve been negotiating for the past 4-5 years. Delta has an AIP that barely passed. Let’s not pretend like American, United, and Southwest all have TA’s or even close. By the time they do, we are pattern bargaining again within the year. Again, unique situation. We do have leverage but not as much as some of
you guys think. For those of you that say we accepted the 1st offer that was sent out, this is probably the 9th or 10th offer that was finally deemed acceptable enough to send out.
To the unions credit, they pivoted away from full Section 6 negotiations and focused on rates. Yes, they got everyone hyped with PS. That’s debatable whether it was a good tactic. It did net us another 17k captains 11k for FO’s. That’s not nothing. Especially for a company that’s not turning a profit.
I don’t like the lack of PS on this, but it’s not a hill I’m going to die on atm.
I don’t like the snap up putting us behind Alaska. No offense to Alaska, but I don’t want them included in our peer group in the JCBA.
Based on a shortened timeline and the full context of all the moving parts in the equation, it just makes more sense to me to vote yes. I’m not trying to change anyones mind, don’t care what you vote, just offering a different point of view.