Originally Posted by
Carl Spackler
No wiggy, I'm not confusing anything. You guys tickle me with your premise that DOH is the most far fetched concept on the planet. Most mergers have either gone straight DOH or have some DOH component in it.
There is an inherent fairness in giving each employee credit for every day that employee has worked for their pre-merger company. You must cross a very high bar to overcome that. In the previous distress mergers with DAL, you easily overcame that because there was no arbitration. America West was able to overcome it by showing USAir as an all but dead airline. I don't think you guys successfully showed that with NWA - although your team sure tried.
Each merger is different and there are many ways to overcome any unfairness involved with DOH. But DOH as a methodology is time tested, with a very long history. Does it get chosen as the method of construction in our case?...anybody's guess.
Carl
Look at the "heart" of ALPA merger policy:
1. maintain or improve premerger pilot status.
2. minimize detrimental changes to career expectations.
The others are self-evident and uncontroversial, these two are more interesting and are very subtly crafted, on further examination:
For (1.) let's stick with "maintain" rather than "improve" for the time being. So we're left with "maintain", but maintain what?..-premerger pilot status. Why didn't they just say "maintain pilot status"? Why "premerger" pilot status? Could it be they're acknowledging that each pilot group, taken separately, enjoys a "status" uniquely, relatively their own? If they had merely said "maintain pilot status", -a more general statement, wouldn't that imply there is some general, universal, absolute standard of "pilot status", that would apply (such as DOH or longevity)?
But the language does not say that, and ALPA therefore does not mean to imply that. Futhermore, the word "improve" as applied to a universal, absolute standard of "pilot status" would make no sense. How can you "improve" an absolute? How can you "improve" a date of hire, or a longevity?
Clearly the word "status" in the language "premerger pilot status" is not meant to imply there is some arbitrary, absolute "philosophical" standard, -but just the opposite. Status implies tangible assets---positions, categories, payrates, "jobs", held uniquely within and relative to that ("premerger") pilot group only. ALPA merger policy goal is to match and merge those respective tangibles as closely as possible to maintain and reflect, in the combined group, the very same unique, relative premerger positions, categories, "status" belonging to each group.
For (2.) notice it is written: "minimize detrimental changes to..." rather than "maximize beneficial changes to...." or "eliminate detrimental changes to..." or "maintain or improve career expectations". This seems to imply that detrimental changes are a "given" or, at least, highly likely, or, just likely. In any event, detrimental changes are anticipated, and this ambiguous language is used to address an ambiguous idea...the future, notoriously unpredictable, futilely (for our purposes) acted upon in the present, thus having the lowest chance of success, or the lowest chance of having any affect at all,... but embraced in principle by all of us....tough thing to do without stepping on some toes...."at the expense of the other"