Originally Posted by
HermannGraf
I agree and I am also considering voting YES in the next drive but there is one thing the company has done right........
Skywest is (contrary to what I believed) way overstaffed and no furloughs yet........ The company has not tried to save money by letting people go (yet).
I know a few guys that have an average of 15 hours / month of flying while on reserve for the last two years.....I believe there are at least 100 pilots averaging that amount of hours while getting paid for 75 hours.
Skywest could easely furlough 100 to 200 pilots and keep the operation as it is. We have bases with 50% or more on reserve.
I think they are trying to find any way possible to deal with what "no furloughs" cost the company and that is why we are seeing these negative changes.
When the company mentioned "good things to come" after the last drive the crisis was not here and noone knew how bad the market would be today.
So yes, we have had negative changes but these changes are also related to bad times for the company, no growth for the last year and an uncertain operational future. It is not like we can get better QOL no matter how the company is doing or how the future looks.
Maybe it would have cost us 200 furloughs to keep everything we had intact like they have done at other places. I do not know if that would have been the right road...........
Some would say "but we have almost a billion in cash"......
The company cannot just use the capital to cover "no changes" for all in bad times.
That money is there as reserve for and if United closes the doors (we do over 1000 departures a day for them and would go under without that money), for growth if possible and for high cost events like having to overhaul a lot of engines in a short period of time.
During 2007-2008 Skywest hired tons of pilot for future expansion that never came. To keep all these pilots cost a lot more money that what the company counted with. Yes we have had and have different programs to ease that but it has not been enough.
So while I am not happy with the changes and would probably vote yes in the next drive I am trying to see both sides of the picture.
The company is not "using any capital to cover no changes for all in bad times"...SkyW is one of the very few companies still showing a large profit quarter after quarter(even Southwest has been losing money for the last 4 or 5 quarters)!! The fact that we are still showing an operational and net profit would indicate they are actually adding to their surplus capital. They purchased ASA with some of that capital, and have been investing in a carrier in Brazil to the maximum amount allowed by the laws there.
As far as furloughs go the last several dozen times I've tried to drop a trip or even take vacation/user I've been denied due to insufficient reserves. I've also been called on my days off because they supposedly were below minimum reserves "system wide"! It appears they aren't really all that "overstaffed"???!!!!