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Old 06-17-2009, 11:32 PM
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CAL EWR
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Default Magenta Line June 17

The Magenta Line for Wednesday, June 17, 2009

“Airline pilots are highly skilled safety professionals. They are responsible for people’s lives. Airline pilots deserve the respect that their profession once had and they should be paid far more…” - Congressman Jerry F. Costello, Chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee Hearing on Regional Air Carriers and Pilot Workforce Issues, June 11, 2009.


Today is Wednesday, June 17, 2009 and there are 11 items for discussion.


Item 1: Who’s Fooling Who?, or, Management Reminds Us How Lucky We Are

We work for the greatest management team in history, we have the best pilot contract of any airline, and we love it!

OK, so we’re O-for-three here but you’d never know it by reading one of management’s latest missiles. They may have aimed at our hearts and minds but, as usual, they missed low and hit us somewhere else entirely.

This article, in which management does it’s level best to convince us our bank accounts are overflowing and that our retirement programs rank right up there, with, with…uh, well, this is where their argument kind of loses steam and settles back to earth with a deflated hiss.

Thanks to the magic of reality, management’s claims are easily disproved—and we’re just the guys to do it.

Let’s talk about pay to start. But let’s also remind ourselves of one very important fact: pay rates are only about 20% of what makes a good contract. The Devil (and the real money) are found elsewhere. Larry Kellner’s office probably.

We’ll say this outright: our pay is about comparable to everybody else—at least those airlines that have made a couple of trips through BK court to squeeze every last drop of blood from the pilot’s turnips. But if you add those airlines whose flight crews have not felt the icy grasp of management’s fingers on their wallets, the story is a bit different.

Second year FO pay at Continental ranges from $57 to $75 per hour. Second year pay at those airlines who managed to pay their pilots real money and still not go bankrupt ranges from $72 to $136 per hour. Are you feeling the love yet?

Management claims that the real reason we make so much less per cockpit hour than industry-leader American Airlines is that our guys are so much more junior than AA’s and we have so many more pilots on the years 2 through 5 pay scale. Of course there’s those numbers above: everybody else makes $72 to $136 per hour in just their second year. We make $57 to $75. Figures lie, liars figure, and airline management…they just don’t do either very well.

What do AirTran, Alaska, Southwest, FedEx, and UPS all have in common? They all have higher pay rates than we do for identical or comparable equipment. And Southwest just voted down a pay raise.

While we’re tempted to call game, set, and match at this point, we say, “Oh, let’s not.” Let’s talk about what makes up the other 80% of our contract: work rules, retirement, sick leave, vacation, pass travel, health care—you name it.

How about work rules? “What work rules?”, you ask. Yes, that’s our point.

We have:

-No minimum pay per duty period
-No duty rigs
-A terrible trip rig that only triggers with excessively long layovers
-No night override
-No international override
-One of the worst sick-leave accrual rates
-Training on days off
-The lowest training pay per day
-Vacation that reduces days off based upon the number of vacation days awarded
-A contractual domestic duty-day hours longer than anyone else
-A contractual international duty-day hours longer than anyone else
-No IROs unless required by FARs
-Reduced rest at FAR minimums: 9:15 block to block
-A PBS system that has difficulty honoring seniority

Retirement:

-AA pilots will see 98% income replacement at retirement with a full, active, and unfrozen “A” fund plus a “B” fund
-Alaska pilots still have both “A” and “B” funds
-Other airlines with terminated “A” funds receive “B” fund contributions for pilots on LTD
-UA pilots get a 16% “B” fund

Miscellaneous:

-Astronomical health care costs borne by the employees
-Yearly degradations to the quality of health care selections—while employee costs rise
-A pass-travel “benefit” made unusable by load factors—while management claims we can’t raise fares
-Cockpit jumpseats placed in the hands of disinterested gate agents
-Everything else placed in the hands of the flight attendants

While we love these management softballs lobbed to our plate on the same, slow, identical trajectory, we were hoping by now that knocking them out of the park would no longer be necessary, that management would hide their faces in shame for what they’ve done to us. But they don’t hide, they continue to attack us and our families, they show their faces in public and in our classes and on our jumpseats. They show their faces a lot, actually; we guess that’s where the term “bald-faced” comes from.


Item 2: Flu-Crew Arbitration Resolved

An expedited arbitration was completed late last week in the case of our EWR-NRT Flu-Crew. The arbitrator is finalizing his decision and it should be issued by the end of this week.

While everybody will get paid, the arbitrator ruled that this was not a “safety of flight” issue.

Captain Pierce will address this arbitration more fully on Friday and will provide the actual award or a summary at that time.


Item 3: Mayor of New Orleans Quarantined in Shanghai

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and his family were detained last week by Chinese public health officials upon arrival in Shanghai. Mr. Nagin apparently had contact with an ill passenger on his flight from EWR to PVG on an unspecified airline. Although this was not a “safety of flight” issue, Mr. Nagin, his wife, and a bodyguard were released by Chinese health officials after spending four days in quarantine.
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