Originally Posted by
Check Essential
Gimme a break. Your entire portfolio of posts on this forum is dedicated to telling us how wonderful our situation is compared to some hypothetical disaster that might have occurred if not for Lee Moak and DALPA.
You're all about managing expectations downward.
Here's something productive that I would add. Our payrates suck. Our retirement sucks. Don't sign any more LOAs or MOUs or codeshare deals or anything else with management that doesn't make progress toward fixing that.
Your last apology for DALPA attacked the critics by saying they favored the Cleavon Little approach from Blazing Saddles. (meet my demands or I'll shoot myself) That's not an accurate analogy however. I think we should throw every roadblock we can think of in front of this JAL thing. It may hurt us but it will also hurt the company. That's the same principle underlying a strike. Mutual pain.
We've been helping management rebuild their empire for long enough now. Its time for a little return on our investment.
Essential,
While I agree we have a long way to go to recapturing our lost retirement and payscales we did improvements with the LOAs. We will be the highest paid of the legacies, we don't have guys on furlough and each year we are adding to our 401ks. It doesn't mean we should be satisfied but we have and are making improvements that will hopefully be used as a solid baseline to build off in 2012.
I would rather be negotiating from a position of strength (hopefully the economy has improved by then and our synergies have fully been realized) than go for broke and achieve nothing. Look at UAL, CAL and AMR for how well that has worked for them.