Originally Posted by
hercretired
Yes, however the union is not the one who will be signing the (hopefully higher) pay checks post-new-contract. That entity (Frontier/Barry) will be the one "defining" peers.
I fully agree with this and believe the union/pilot-group approach to negotiations should be of the "realistic approach" variety. "They fly Airbus and make more, so we should make the same" is not going to work. However, if some union financial geniuses could take Delta and United and strip away their credit card program, their global network, their revenue streams, and reverse engineer their resulting "Airbus salary" after all that is removed, we may have a logical place for negotiating.
ALPA represents Kalitta, Amerijet, ATI. They also represent FedEx. So why don't the first three get FedEx pay?
"ALPA sucks"
Ok fine. The teamsters represent Atlas. UPS Pilots is represted by IPA, while the rest of UPS (non-pilots) is teamsters. Do Atlas dudes get UPS Pay?
"Teamsters suck"
Ok, well
"Those arguments make no sense, Delta, FedEx, and UPS are BIGGER and have the ability to pay big pay. Big airline=Big Pay"
Probably, but maybe not. Or maybe we should be careful at least with that argument. They also have bigger costs, more bodies to pay into retirement matching, more complexities internally, etc etc.
Pay is basically a business decision. Whether pilots are approved to strike and cause a work stoppage, is yet to be seen. Sure, Spirit had a strike. Pre-pandemic.
Remember all that stuff, during COVID, about pilot jobs are critical for instrastructure, airlines must keep flying, national security, blah blah ?
Barry and Frontier lawyers have all that ready to go, in the event they think a strike will happen.
1. There will be no strike
2. There will be no "Delta rates"
3. Yes pay will come up. At every pay contract process in history, pay indeed came up.
supply and demand. Cost of labor. You set your labor cost. We have set the bar by asking for parity. We are not going to settle for anything less. Any argument saying otherwise is not gonna work on this pilot group.
They cannot afford to run the whole airline with scabs. They cannot afford to not pay us. They will pay us what we demand and can sort out the increase labor cost with their creative accounting,
If they can’t do it then replace management.
We do our job. The rate is set by the industry and the pilots that operate the aircraft.
We do more red eyes which have increased risks. We have less resources aboard an active flight such as WiFi to get updates of real time risks. Management doesn’t risk their lives for a revenue flight and they can look at what we’re asking and choose to pay us or step down and let some who can manage the company to afford the new rates of pilots.