Originally Posted by
RJSAviator76
How about calling in sick? At one of the largest unionized regionals, actually an airline that purchased a couple of majors recently, you should ask their pilots the policy on sick calls, and the discipline related to what the company may term as "occurrence." It's not a union, it's called a crappy company with abusive management... and they can get away with it too because they know you can't afford to start over and/or don't want to step out of line for that left seat.
How about the best qualified pilot? How about looking at the overall performance? How about peer review? How about a scoring system where your longevity with the company scores you some points for loyalty?
This is not to say that there is no place for seniority, but to base an entire pilot existence and life on his date-of-hire with NO regard whatsoever to anything else is insane. For example, why should a 30 year 777 captain go be an FO flying 737's or MD80's or worse if his airline goes under? Do you not see anything wrong with this picture?
Here's another thing... we like to call ourselves professionals. Ask yourself, if your airline's CEO decides to leave your airline and go to another airline, is he automatically sentenced to being a junior filing clerk simply because he changed his jobs?
Another question I'd really like to hear opinions on... I can understand the fears of "butt-kissing, brown-nosing, rule-bending, etc." in order to get ahead, and this could hold true at a small crappy company. Now let's take a company with several thousand pilots and that airline needs a few thousand captains. How practical would it be to do all those things above to get ahead in such a large organization?
This is a good debate, and I'm glad it's respectful.
I agree that it is hard to rationalize a reward system based on "who's the better pilot". What if however, rewards were based on ones wilingness to go above and beyond minimums. The safest part about an airplane is who's operating it. What if pilots were awarded/rewarded for taking additional safety classes or even paid overtime to attend them. Taking extra simulator sessions that put pilots in real world accident senarios for study (all volutary of course) could be an option. They could offer a test standard to approve raises and other incentives.
UPS does a set of standard tests for it's employees that, if passed gaurantees a raise. I don't know if this option is for pilots. There are plenty of things airlines could do to see who the best are, but will they do these things? That's another question...