Originally Posted by
Captain Bligh
How about straight date of birth?

No.
The reason being that DOB causes a lot of seniority shuffling and erases a lot of expectations. When we were all hired at our respective airlines we could look to our retirement date and see how we would end up in seniority--career expectations. The most fair way is to use relative seniority so that we all end up fairly close to that original expectation. DOB and staple are pretty selfish ways of integration (selfish only if you qualify for senior discounts or are the stapler). IMO