Originally Posted by
RockyBoy
I missed the discussion on the cap and greenslips, but I have to throw my opinon out there so everyone can jump on my case. The Cap should be gone when we don't have guys furloughed period. I'm cool with a cap when guys are on the street, but we don't need it when they are not. I realize it may cause them to hire less people, but I'm not a fan of creating inefficiencies just to create jobs. Let those who want to pick up time pick it up. We need the cap gone in 2012 with a clause that it returns if we furlough. I don't want to pay 1.95% of my pay and have my ability to earn what I want to limited. We should be free to fly as much as we want until guys are furloughed, then a cap should be implemented.
Boy is that shortsighted career and quality of life wise. You will force everyone to fly a lower paying seat and then they have to work even more to make up the difference. A cap is the cornerstone of the contract. Without it everything else becomes meaningless.
Delta essentially operates almost a capless airline now. We made all those changes in the last 10 years. If we went back to a real cap and the vacation system we used to have Delta would have 16,000 pilots today. We had over 10,000 permerger. By the time the 1113 stuff was over we had under 7000 flying the line but the kicker was that number was flying the same amount of block hours as before with the big shift to international.
If you want to sell all your future advancement down the window and be a copilot virtually forever then push for no caps. Keep in mind management is also going to tell you that you don't need and pay raises because your getting it flying more hours and will try and get the higher hours written into future contracts forcing everyone to fly more.
No Cap is a really really bad idea. The current system lifting the cap for double pay is fine. What we really neeed is to go back to training and vacation being pay and credit and moving the current cap down to the line construction window and applying it to swaps and pickups. Then you will see some movement and a huge improvement in quality of life.