Originally Posted by
rickair7777
A few golden days per year is fair enough, and common enough. But two a month? Fairly senior peeps would very quickly get only one weekend off a month because most juniors would use their GD's for a weekend.... the b-day or soccer game on the third Tues of the month sounds nice but anybody without kids is going for weekends. And a lot of the folks with kids.
ME3 doesn't do nearly as much of that stoopid seniority stuff... for example EVERYBODY gets a month or two of reserve each year.
That's a bit different, it's not unreasonable to force seniors to show their hand in advance, not doing so is just laziness. Kind of like they have to bid in advance for those weekends and holidays off... they can't just re-assign their trip to a junior lineholder at the last minute.
So you think that by allowing everyone 2-3 days of their choice off a month would create a world where a Sr bidder would only get one weekend off?
The math wouldn't work that way. It doesn't work that way at any other airline. Why do you think we have to settle for that here?
Would Sr bidders have to work a weekend once in a while? Probably. But you really think it's fair that between the ages of 30-50 you have to choose between "stay an FO and spend time with family" or "take the money and run"? The part that's broken at United (more than any other legacy carrier) is that our seniority system is way more heavily weighted to the SUPER senior.
Why is it that you have to be basically 50% seniority to have all weekends off? It's not that way at any other carrier in the world. Ask around. I have friends that are Jr lineholders at SWA, DL, AA, Spirit, JB, etc. I don't know one of them that doesn't have the ability to have at least 1 weekend off a month. Why do we accept that here. This is probably why UAL management is so hesitant to give us a better STD or sick leave accrual. We've de-facto turned our sick leave into the only times when Jr people can get time off to spend with their families. That's a broken system and pretty much one of the "main things" we are fighting for in this contract negotiation.
Fix this one thing and UAL will start firing on all cylinders. We need a progressive seniority system, not the "All or nothing" system we have now.
The reason I suggest the GDO system is we already have that system in place at United. We could implement it literally tomorrow. Or within a few months at least.
This have high confidence this would work. I've worked with PBS here in the past, and while it hasn't been tested, I have full confidence it would work.
If PBS can't make it work with the current staffing (which I'm confident it would since every other carrier has the ability for JR pilots to have better schedules) then the company would have to fix the shortfall with overtime or hire more.
When did we get to the point where half of the pilots at United have to work all weekends and all holidays throughout half their career, or take less $$?
This isn't a big ask. We've just been beat down so long, we don't know what other pilots have.