Originally Posted by
RJSAviator76
Absolutely. I care about my total career value, work rules, soft money, and how the whole contract translates into the bottom line. Rates, while important, are only a fraction of the total equation and are a mere snapshot of one metric out of many. It's easy to focus on one and disregard a lot of other things.
Not only that, it's absolutely dangerous as hell. Given that the company has started kinda negotiating in public, how many people will fixate on rates and disregard things like LTD or rig, or reigning in the training scheduling BS, etc, etc. etc. Care to guess how many would see the rates, be blown away by them and ignore everything else? Time to focus on EVERYTHING. The full monty. Not just pay rates.
I 100% agree with you on all of that. This contract is very possibly the one shot in all of our careers to attain a true "generational" contract that rewards us for our professional skills.
For me, our contract must include everything you mentioned and then some. That means, along with industry-leading everything else, our 12-yr CA rates must exceed the high $400's per TFP in order to provide us with industry-leading career compensation, period and reflect the fact that we fly so many more block hours and deal with so much more complexity in our operations than The Big Three.