Originally Posted by
Bluedriver
You're so cute.
I am, thanks. I’m just not the one for you
Originally Posted by
Bluedriver
How are the checks we got years ago, which were from the profits of the company, not dividends, not relevant?
What do you think dividends are? Profits of the company! Ding ding ding. Companies keep a certain amount of cash on hand, but when a matured company has paid all its bills and has excess profits they will typically do one of three things:
The first two have to do with how companies fund expansion/operations, either debt or equity. So with extra cash they will either 1) pay off debt or 2) buy back stock
Otherwise the owners, the shareholders, will vote to 3) pay out dividends from the excess profits. This is the same pie that the slice of employee profit sharing comes from.
Originally Posted by
Bluedriver
We were a growth company then (even more so) and we are a growth company now. So you guys can stop trying to tell us a properly written plan won't pay out since we're a growth company, we've already seen that it does pay out.
Just because JetBlue paid a dividend, and thus a slice of that as profit sharing, in the past as a smaller growing company doesn’t mean they have the ability to continue to do so. This is not being an apologist for your management. The company has taken on significant debt obligations (and now a few billion more for NK) and has also issued tens of millions of new shares of stock in 2020 to raise capital. The combined market capitalization of both our companies together is still barely a fifth of Delta. This means significant capital requirements will be needed to continue funding growth for the foreseeable future if their intentions are to compete at the legacy level, which makes it very unlikely for a pot of excess cash to be consistently leftover from which to pay dividend or profit sharing, despite their attempts to both grow and pay out in the past.
And fine, you didn’t give it away, it was taken from you. Whatever I don’t care. I am not opposed to profit sharing language, nor am I saying I wouldn’t like a nice check when the day comes that the company is sitting on tons of cash. I am also very pragmatic about the fact that even with “industry standard profit sharing language” it is highly unlikely we would see significant, steady, or equivalent profit sharing checks that our legacy counterparts enjoy. What I am saying is that I would not trade away lifestyle parts of the contract that are tangible and useful now in order to obtain that language. That’s my stance.