I think what most now are coming to realize is that the company grossly overstated the likelihood and scope of furloughs as they were being considered. Their expectation always was that COVID would significantly impact air travel for around a year. (It did.) Since our contract by design makes short-term furloughs very costly & inefficient, the company knew that a large scale furlough for a one year event in reality would save them very little money. What would potentially save them a lot, however, is if they could frighten us into taking voluntary pay reductions while saving them the cost & inefficiencies of retraining, furlough pay, etc. In essence, we gave them everything they wanted about furloughs (lower payroll) while relieving them of every contractual obligation that made them unlikely to actually go through with it in the first place.

I don’t doubt a lot of guys voted for it with good intentions, but the only thing it was really a paradigm shift from is sticking to our contract. In the wake of TUMI, it became a little more apparent how our union had become misguided by getting too friendly with the company. In retrospect (for some) the Pandemic LOA became an illustration of what happens when the union spends too much time “seeing it from the company’s point of view”. Rather than representing the pilots, they became salesmen for the company’s proposals. In the follow up, they even supported the company’s efforts in TUMI 1 to dodge the 5% pay increase they had previously agreed to.

No one ought to be “butthurt” as the fed $$$ saved us from the worst consequences of our poor decisions, but we should understand our mistakes for what they were to avoid repeating them in the future.