The year one through five thing is because that particular demographic took it in the shorts during the last CBA. Every other year in both seats matched the curve drawn by our competitor pay rates year for year... except our years one through five FOs who were below the curve. They deserve to be trued up.

As for the "supposal", it does two things. First, it gives us a pretty good idea of what arbitration would've looked like if both sides agreed to it. And it gives us a good idea of which way the mediator is leaning. Since the company has been making incremental moves since September, I doubt they'll call it an impasse. My guess is if there's no movement by both sides towards this "supposal" they'll put us on ice.

IF the government is even in business by the 30th. The house went home for the weekend and the government runs out of money in six days.

All that said, I agree with everyone here. Go ahead and put us on ice. It hurts them way more than it hurts us. An indefinite delay will hurt recruiting and retention, and the bill for retro will continue to grow. I'd welcome a few months without emails from Karl.

The NMB mediators are a bunch of ex-USAir guys from an era when they HATED SWA. They hated that they had to stand up Metrojet to try and compete with Herb and they hated that Metrojet was essentially a b-scale. So the question I have is do Mike Tosi and Chris Beebe still harbor ill will towards SWA, or towards the SWAPA pilots for lowering the bar on pay (not to mention PFT) in the late 1990s, and will that influence their "supposal" next week?

Guess we'll find out. I'm taking the holiday week off and am going to try not to think about SWA, 737s, or any of this garbage. Let me know if anything interesting happens.