Originally Posted by Nosmo King

Let me see if I can move some of the irritation in the correct direction, management.

We are complaining quite a bit about "holes" in the contract and things that we should have cherry picked from both PWAs.

They are valid complaints because there are very few times that a pilot group will have that much leverage in a negotiation.

This is why management hires consulting firms.

A consulting firm will advise management on many issues, one of which is time deadlines and whether they should allow negotiations to be compressed or dragged out.

IMO fNW management has used this in the past to drag out negotiations when times are good and we wanted our piece of the pie. They have also used it in concessions while they gauged the reaction of the pilot group to the latest proposal to gut the contract. It's one of the many tools they have in their arsenal.

In the case of the NW/DL merger their decision may have been driven by cash position or a they may have been told it was a way to reduce negotiating leverage of labor or it could have been a combination of many other things. We will probably never know unless management chooses to reveal their secrets.

Whatever the reason(s), BOTH MECs were time compressed by management deadlines. Both were given a very limited amount of time to hash out the MAJOR issues in a LOA/JPWA. This left limited time and manpower to learn each others contracts and glean the good stuff while excising the bad stuff. So the MECs did what they almost always do, they look at pay, retirement, scope, benefits and whatever they think are the major issues of the pilot group at that time.

That means a lot of the goodies fell through the cracks because we didn't have time to be do a thorough comparison of both contracts side by side.

Things that might have been changed if we had more time to analyze? Here's a short list from this thread.

Short Call
Reserve guarantee and rigs
Retirement/DC
Commute Policy
AE/APA
Instructors hotel and per diem
PBS

Other things I wish we had changed or done differently?

BCBS instead of UHC (Not likely considering where RA's last job was)
fNW long term sick conversion
<insert dozens of items here>

IMO it was an excellent strategy by management to reduce our negotiating power. Whether it was a by product of other factors or a primary negotiating tool doesn't matter.

I would bet good money that this discussion is going on at UAL/CAL headquarters.

If you want to be mad at either or both MECs, that's fine, but be mad at them for not finding a way to get the time needed to do a more thorough job. They did the best they could with the time they were given.