One methodology - coming from me, a guy who has employees that earn ME money, is that pay raises should be based on what we bring in for the company - to a degree. I think this is probably where: "The bigger airplanes pay more" pay structure came from.

One thing that you learn rather quickly as an employer is that employees get paid what they get paid - you, as the business owner, get their share of the profit. Conversely, in bad times, you eat their share of the loss. If that loss goes on too long, you shrink, through layoffs.

I think it is premature to try to boil down payraise negotiations to every possible permutation, both positive and negative. There is of course the arguement that "we lose money on Hawaii" so those pilots should pay for the opportunity to come to work (this would be the bottom end arguement). The top end arguement would be that we get a dumptruckload of $100 bills everytime we go to Lagos.

I personally think that since we lost the DB retirement, there is a whole order of magnitude less cost in employing one pilot. Some of that should be recoup-able in payrates either toward the 415C limit or in straight pay.

DAL seems, in many cases, to sell the tickets at cost plus a little. Part of this is due to wanting to be on the front page of priceline or one of the other services. The profit gravy is, to a degree, derived from extra fees. We are embarking on a program to de-list from the ticket mills - this is good. Being able to own our pricing power cannot be a bad thing.

It gets debated about once a year about how much additional ticket price we would have to charge to cover X% raises. In reality, for those that have been on the property for a while, I really don't have to care how they fund the raise. Management really doesn't want our input on any phase of operational improvements. Why would my opinion of how they fund my pay be important.

If they can afford to pay greenslip pay to get a 4 pilot trip to take off, after the first crew times out, I cannot see how restoration of C2K plus interest is out of the question. After all, greenslip pay today is just yesterday's straight pay.