Originally Posted by
TED74
Out of the woodwork? I think I comment pretty regularly.
I'm just an observer of human behavior. It's pretty easy to say "those guys suck" and "I could do better"...so that's what you hear here a lot. Folks who think we caved on this when there was a clear and significantly better path haven't shown me any reason to think SK's judgement was out to lunch. No one who thinks taking this stuff to a grievance can show me a historic grievance settlement that demonstrates we would have had a strong win on 23m7...which was rolled in with the batch size changes. The last time I thought we had a clear grievance win, the settlement paid be about half an hour of pay. Yikes.
I'd never want to commit my (or my family's) time to union work. The best I can do is pay attention to candidates running to represent me and engage them in their official role. I'm lucky enough to trust my rep, who has always been responsive and informative when I've reached out to him. I trust the way he thinks and makes decisions. I want to continue to have excellent representation, which will only happen when good people sign up to serve their constituents. I called my rep the same hour this agreement was made public (furious), and I asked questions and listened to the details. In the end, the situation was complex - as are most things folks here try to oversimplify - and I'm not certain there was low hanging fruit that the loudest complainers think was so obviously missed by SK and the scheduling committee. And as far as I know, a majority of the MEC with far more information than I have made the judgement call to support the agreement.
I'm all ears - this agreement was egresious why, exactly? What is your supporting evidence that we could have achieved significantly more, on a timeline that wouldn't have ceded significant unaccounted-for losses in pilot pay? What percentage of pilots didn't want batch limitations? (I don't know the answer but would love to). Some folks have claimed there is a sweet spot in batch sizes...but who decides what that is? Someone who needs another hour to make an airport run happen or someone who needs a day of coordination to line up a nanny?
There are definitely a lot of people who made a living on batch size violations and 23M7. They are some of the loudest people who opposed the deal. I would have liked to have seen a better deal but I also know that we were reaching critical mass on seniority abrogation and contract alternative compliance. I also know that arbitration would have been flipping a coin and would have rather gotten a few things we wanted out of it rather than risking establishing precedence that 23M7 could be used at will.
As one rep told me, there were no guardrails on 23M7. The company could have used it days or even weeks in advance to cover trips. Additionally, the company didn't have to come to the table with a grievance settlement. They could have ignored it and forced it into arbitration because they knew there were no notes that said 23M7 wasn't to be used that way. They didn't. We got a deal.