Originally Posted by
Hedley
I agree that money would motivate, but motivating the senior without alienating the junior would be a trick. If NBCA paid closer to WBCA and significantly widened the gap between NBCA and WBFO the left seat would go much more senior. It would be worth the work at that point and the vacancies would probably fill. Using the new Delta rates as an example, if WBCA paid $417, NBCA paid $390-400, yet WBFO still paid $285 you’d see lots of senior people bid captain. We’ll never see a contract get ratified where captains get disproportionate raises over FO’s though. Kirby either needs to figure something out to encourage upgrades or postpone the aircraft deliveries and slow the expansion to a more manageable level.
Basically what you’re saying is that it would solve the problem & get a lot more money for some of our pilots, but we could never pass it here because it wouldn’t make more money for all our pilots at once. Which I don’t disagree with, but I think it’s unfortunate & indicative of a self-defeating mentality we tend to see here.
Every time we talk about contract gains, people are resistant to improvements that don’t benefit them directly. Lineholders don’t want to waste negotiating capital on RSV rules, locals don’t care about commuter protection, NB guys don’t want to focus on WB benefits, etc. The irony, of course being that when we’re only willing to consider changes that benefit everyone, we all end up a little worse off for it. A great contract focuses on giving something to everyone rather than everything to all.
I don’t want anyone to get less, but the current market suggests there could be additional money available to the NBCA seat. Walking away from that simply because it doesn’t benefit everyone equally is myopic & self defeating in my opinion, since most of our pilots would have the opportunity to benefit from that increase at some point should they choose to do so. Anytime there’s money available for someone, I want to move it away from the corporate level & into the pockets of as many pilots as we can.