Originally Posted by
NeedAJob
I felt it necessary to register to this forum to make a couple points. First of all, GoJet guys have been hired all over the place, Delta, Air Tran, American (recalled), Continental, Compass, Atlas, Southern, and ABX Air (Airborne Express) where I worked.
After recently being furloughed from ABX Air, I have been hot on the job hunt trying to find somewhere...anywhere to work. Some of the folks posting such nasty things on this thread need to understand this: with the current state of the economy, let alone our industry, we are talking about survival in the hunter gatherer sense of the word. Nobody is talking about raises or improving contracts right now. It is simply survival.
At ABX we recently learned DHL (we are the domestic flight department for DHL with AStar Air Cargo) plans to pull out of the U.S. effectively putting our airline out of business. We're talking about massive job loss in southern Ohio as you may have seen on NBC and other networks. Pilots that were making between 150,000 and 400,000 bucks a year collecting unemployment!
I applaud the union at Trans States for attempting to improve the quality of life for their pilots, and I hope that they are able to survive in the face of their competition at GoJet, and everywhere else for that matter. Survive is all they can hope for at this point; nobody is getting raises this year anywhere! Having said that, I defer to my original remark, we are looking at survival in the hunter gatherer sense of the word. GoJet is one of the few places still hiring, and growing! That's about enough to sell any guy that has been out of work for a while. It is a J.O.B. and it's better than working at Wal-Mart (who isn't hiring in my hometown). Some posts I have read refer to trying to "hold the bar", and "improve quality of life", and that's reasonable enough. However, that fight is going to be pretty darn tough for a couple years until things get better. When things improve, pick up the ax and start swinging. Until then, my advice is to hunker down in a safe place and weather the storm. GoJet may just be that safe place for many many furloughed pilots given they're actually hiring and growing right now.
By the way, Nobody at the majors I know has ever heard of GoJet. Guys at Airborne certainly haven't.
News flash, in this economy, Hulas is still making money. Even if he's not making money, we don't care because he's used us to make money for the last 2 plus years of our expired contract. Just because the economy is down, I'm not going to let that get in the way of how I vote when it comes to self help.
Also, are you seriously going to give me the "I need to feed my family" line? If you really cared about your family, you wouldn't be getting a new FO job at GJ. You'd be getting a job at Home Depot or the like...heck, you could even make more money working at the Croc kiosk at the mall. Going from the pay at ABX to FO at GJ? I know that's not gonna pay your morgage. However, what it is going to do is lower the bar so when the economy does swing up, you and your fellow pilots are going to have stagnant or worse wages.