Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
Very interesting exchange with GB over the airline industry and the Colgan crash with PBS, for most of you, you'll really like GB even more:
FRONTLINE: flying cheap: interviews: gordon bethune | PBS
Really? You think $16,000 a year as a starting salary for a first officer is enough?
Can I tell you how they get to that, just so that the public knows? Every three or four years, there's contract negotiations between labor groups and the company. The company says:
"We can afford to pay this much money. This is total dollars. How would you like to allocate it?" The union who's negotiating on behalf of its members allocates that money in a way that can get ratified by the vote of the pilots. You know who's not there? The people you haven't hired yet. You know who always gets left, because the captain wants $2 more? And everybody says, "Well, you know, my first year we didn't get paid anything either, so tough **** for them." ... The reason it's $16,000 a year is because that union wanted that money somewhere else, and that's the way it works.
It's the union's fault.
Well, you only get so much money. How much would you like to allocate? Would you like to have every pilot get $2 less than ours so we could pay the first-year people this much, or would you rather have the $2 an hour in your paycheck and let the first-year people go probationary as they are, like every other, and you were? And that's what they elect to do. ...
I know this is a few pages back but,
I think he makes some noteworthy points about management's role in during contract negotiations. From what I've understood at DAL, back in the day this was how compensation packages were negotiated. Management would throw a lump of money at the pilot group and the leadership would decide how to divvy it up amongst the pilot group.
What I like about this is that management isn't telling is HOW to pay pilots. I've always thought that we should negotiate a lump sum of money without justification of pay scales. Basically, the union should decide what each specific seat in each aircraft category should pay, then calculate that total amount required to provide that compensation package.
The lump figure is what our union should be negotiating for. The more variables introduced complicates the process while becoming divisive to the pilot group.
Not sure if this is the method used or not, but either way we cannot continue to send crap down the river because long term it only hurts contract negotiations.