During Covid, one of the LOAs contained a provision that prohibited the company from "spamming" calls to all pilots for a single available trip. Pilots were upset, the company wanted a bunch of stuff during Covid to help ease the pain so they agreed to this. Basically, less than 12 hours notice, they could call up to 5 at a time. More than, they could call one. There was an automatic penalty for violation which was 2 hours of pay for each pilot in the bad batch.

Pilots caught on. Scheduling drives coverage like a 10 year old in a Miata. People were putting in slip requests just hoping they catch the company speeding. And they got caught a lot. So then company gets a little relief in the new contract and an additional day to run coverage. Then the severe understaffing crunch happens in the revenge travel boom era because crew resources thought Covid was going to be 2 decades long and were shocked everyone who told them they were wrong, were right. So now, a metric ton of premium flying is going out. But it's taking them A LONG time to cover. Like, a day for a trip. So they find a rarely used part of the contract called 23M7 that allows them to skip coverage order and allows them to call ANYONE available all at once to offer inverse assignments. The catch is, they have to pay the pilot that would have been awarded the trip single pay in addition to the double pay IA.

Problems: accepting a IA via phone put you in a queue to talk to a scheduler. There was no rights to a trip and is first come, first serve. Knowing this, pilots were calling scheduling asking if any trips were in IA and asking for them, even if they hadn't been called. After some success, pilots were looking at OT, seeing trips they wanted, then calling scheduling to tell them they'd do trip x even if they hadn't started coverage on it. Scheduling, screen flashing red like it'd fallen off a boat in GTA, accepted any med packs it could find. Only, they were cheating and there was no requirement to annotate that 23M7 had been used. And they rarely looked up who was the harmed pilot to pay them correctly.

So now, every pilot and their nosey spouse was filing a report to the scheduling committee any time they saw a IA. And the committee fell painfully behind. And since many pilots were not calling to notify the company of a grievance, the company was rejecting M7 payments because it was outside the 120 day window.

The union files a grievance and is convinced it will lose. So they go into dispute resolution and accept what many have claimed is an insulting offer. Effectively, the company gets to eliminate batch sizes. But it must promise to annotate any 23M7 use and are restricted from using M7 outside of 8 hours.

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