Originally Posted by
ninerdriver
I get your point about money and the ask. I think you're still missing the point that reserve doesn't go junior if it's done right.
We'll always have some twelve-month pilots who will take the first upgrade and run with it, no matter what the QOL hit is. The company is banking on that with this vacancy.
Better reserve rules don't fix the QOL of junior lines. Instead, they provide an alternative to bidding junior lines. For example, a senior FO might take an upgrade into weekends-off reserve over an upgrade spending every Saturday night in GRR, provided that the weekdays don't involve sitting FSB unused every other day, and provided that reserve line had more or similar days off to the junior line full of those four-day weekend GRR trips with the four-hour sit in ORD or IAH before go-home leg.
If better reserve rules entice more middle-seniority pilots to upgrade, then those pilots will take the bulk of the reserve lines. Bottom-seniority upgrades will end up flying the lines with red-eyes, day sleeps, and winter DSMs, because they won't be senior enough to hold reserve.
The overarching point is that being junior needs to be more bearable than it is right now. By definition there will always be reserve and there will always be junior lines. It doesn’t really matter how they stack in relative seniority. They just have to suck less.
In my opinion, the gap between reserve and line holder is just unacceptably wide. It’s a combination of money and QoL. For example not being able to trade on reserve is a major red flag. I doubt that will change in any contract scenario though.
The other issue is that there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the system. Bidding 80% in the past gave you a good shot at a line. With all the staffing shenanigans it has become Russian roulette. The end result? People don’t bid until they are safely in line holder territory - 60% or so…