Originally Posted by
notEnuf
Why is it not fair? They didn't know about said trip and got paid for it anyway. The whole purpose is a disincentive to skip coverage or at least not punish the person who should have flown the trip from being cheated. As you have shown with multiple in a day, there will be other trips. I used to clear my schedule to build a better one (known as credit surfing) I never once have received a 23M7 and managed to reconstruct an acceptable line. The risk of clearing your schedule is real and if you have to scramble at the end of the month, then that is due to your own decision. A counter is the only way to move the benefit down the seniority list fairly. If all you want is 4 day 23M7 pay then your slips should reflect that. Just like it would reflect the 1 or 2 days during the week if you are credit surfing. BWYWWWYB This isn't an ATM it's a way to keep the company from messing with the pilot group.
The bold part is the problem. How do we ever truly know who ACTUALLY would fly the trip? It's impossible to determine. And I disagree that the purpose of 23M7 is to disincenvize skipping trip coverage. If it was truly worked that way then why is being used left and right? The purpose of 23M7 is to provide flexibility to the company in trip coverage while
ensuring that a pilot who was skipped is made whole. It's not there to spread money throughout the entire category. WS and GS go in seniority order. We don't we have a WS counter too? Because that's too much of an abrogation of seniority when it comes to schedule control. If a pilot is the most senior to have a WS in and gets skipped, he should get 23m7, because that makes him whole for being the harmed pilot. He's not harmed again until he gets skipped for another rotation that he'd be legal for had he also flown the first skipped rotation. A junior pilot is never the actual harmed pilot unless scheduling cuts coverage in the middle of a step and the trip was on that junior pilot's line at that time.
You talk about a schedule clearer bearing the risk of not being able to fill back up, but how can a pilot fill up when they are repeated getting skipped for trips that they would have done in order to fill up? It's not their fault when scheduling doesn't even run the WS step and shoots tons of trips out to IA. Yes, there are defintely M7 surfers out there right now, but if you add a counter that just incentivizes literally the entire category to put in slips hoping they score one. It's the same thing since practically none of them would have any intention of actually picking up any of the M7 rotations if they were actually offered.
So you say the point of a counter is to move the M7 payments further down the list. I say that it's original intent is to make the harmed pilot whole. A counter would never actually pay the harmed pilot. The logical method is to use the "assumed it was flown" method for determining when the next payment would be due. This by it's very nature would drive M7 further down the list, just not nearly as far as a counter would. So we as a pilot group need to decide what we want - a process that more protects seniority and more closely tracks with making a harmed pilot whole, or one that spreads the money around much more but is basically a lottery system hoping you get a good "skip" when your number is up?