Originally Posted by
jdt30
757driver, How do you get screwed with relative seniority? If you are 15% on at CAL and you end up at 15% at the combined company how is that screwed?
jdt30, just so unrealistic expectations don't take hold, relative seniority also involves several other factors, as was mentioned by CatIIIc.
One of those relative seniority tweaks is going to look at the size of equipment on each company's property. To illustrate, let's break it down by United's payscales (I'd do it by CAL's but I'm not smart enough to figure out the ratios between LN and SN). You've got three groups - 747/777, 757/767, and A319/320/737. There will be an integration based on those three groupings, so a bottom 777 guy at CAL would end up lower %age in the combined list than the bottom 777 guy. Look at how USAir/AmWest's merger worked out - the top 500 spots went to the easties due to having larger equipment on property.
That's only one factor; I'm sure that an arbitrator will take others into account.
With CAL's new website, they are signalling that they are leaving SkyTeam, based on the way I read the following quote from question 3 in their FAQ: "We are committed to being an important player in one of the three global alliances, so that we can continue to offer a broad, global network to our customers. We will communicate any changes that result from that review."
I read that as CAL saying that they'll either end up in Star Alliance or One World. I can't see Tilton allowing CAL into Star without a merger, and if a merger takes place, LCC will be in the same shoes as CAL is currently in. That is, LCC will end up getting frozen out of a lot of Star codeshare bookings.
I don't know how a hookup with AMR will work for CAL; that could be interesting. I imagine that AMR will either merge with CAL or LCC. If AMR doesn't merge, I could see them extracting quite a bit of blood from whomever they allow to join One World.
If CAL ends up merging with either AMR or CAL, there's going to have to be some additional investment capital thrown into the merged company. I'm guessing that it'd be ~$2B; someone threw $1.5B into NWA/DAL. I was surprised to see that NWA/DAL; I didn't think that there was much investment money out there to be had.
No matter what happens in all of this, I hope that CAL's pilots don't have any ill will toward UAL pilots. I haven't heard any derogatory remarks about CAL pilots from UAL. In the UAL/U merger back in 2000, things got ugly fast. There are still a lot of UAL pilots who have no love lost for the easties. I'd hate to see history repeat itself on either side.