Originally Posted by Waves

Contract 2012 is just around the corner. If this management team is anything like their predecessors, here are a few things to remember. There is no free lunch. Management assigns value to anything that is perceived to be a positive for the pilot group. Not some, but all positive things, whether it is scope, NFC, more pay, time off, better benefits, etc will be considered to have value. Some of you may not agree with this or like it, but that is the way it works. DALPA works with those parameters, but the perceived cost of each item is where the differences show up at the negotiating table. Sometimes management even turns a negative concession into a positive, i.e. when we gave them the “Vacation Bank.” The change to our vacation was probably the biggest concession we ever gave them. I’m sure some remember this, but basically we used to bid for our vacations and any touching trips were dropped with pay. This meant that a pilot could very often get an entire month off with pay for just one week of vacation. Now multiply that times 6 or 7 weeks of vacation per year and you quickly get the picture. Senior Bubbas were only flying about half the year and so on. I don’t remember what the exact numbers were; but that little give back singlehandedly reduced the pilot workforce by a huge amount. What we got for its replacement was the Vacation Bank as we know it today. Admittedly, the previous method was a bit grandiose, but it was still a huge concession. How the company tried to make it look like a positive is when the unused vacation bank payout rolled around in April, they didn’t want to pay us. They said it was going to cost them too much money. R U KIDDING ME? We had just saved the company millions of $ and they were acting like they had done us a huge favor. They eventually paid us. By the way, I voted “NO” for that contract as well. I could give several more examples, but me thinks you gets it. Later, Waves