Originally Posted by
20Fathoms
I may be reading this wrong and don’t want to put words in your mouth, but are you actually saying we should get rid of auto accept?
I have flown with several people who said they use auto accept but have no intent to ever pick up a GS. It's not that I don't like auto-accept, it's that I don't care for the practice of using it to punish the company or giving themselves a bucket of one for every single GS call. Now, again, the company has created this monster because they don't use discretion when using large batch sizes. This practice won't stop even if batch sizes were returned to pre-LOA levels.
Originally Posted by
Verdell
I honestly don't care if a few senior pilots are making bank on contractual rules. I do care if the company is violating the contract. I think that balancing senior/junior is an entirely separate discussion to the one happening here.
So what's the trouble?
1) super-seniors making bank
2) company not paying properly
My vote is for #2.
And if #2 is the goal, and we furiously enforce it, I think that's the closest alligator to the boat and the best bargaining chip.
#1 can come later.
From what I understand, the scheduling committee members are tracking every single IA and ensuring 23M7 is paid properly, so number 2 is a non-issue, especially if it's as a previous poster said, that every time it's identified, it's paid. So number 2 isn't REALLY a problem. Number one is a problem but not in the way you implied. The company doesn't care who they pay, they just want the flying covered. What I do know is that skipping to IA means most premium trips are going to the bottom 50% without any real leveling mechanism. And the remedy is being paid to the top 1-5% of the list. The company is well within their rights to use 23M7 anytime within 8 hours (an incredibly unsatisfactory amount of time to use it) and it is directly harming not only pilots in the top 50% of the list and stripping them of their seniority, but also any pilot on a golden day (think reduced PB days as well) and any pilot whose accumulated credit is already greater than ALV.