Originally Posted by
Sink r8
FTB,
I don't quite understand the logic on the snap-back statement. Snap-backs are given in return for concessions, in case the company does better than estimated, in the future. If you're after improvements, or getting imporvements, you generally don't want snap-backs. The company might want snap-back-downs, but I don't see how/why we could have negotiated snapbacks in LOA 19. We needed them in LOA 46 and 51, but those were the bend-over contracts, remember? It's pretty clear to me why we didn't get them back then. Was that before your time?
The mechanism often used to get more when times are better, when used in conjuction with contractual improvements, is often profit-sharing, something we already negotiated. I'd like it to be more, but the kind of variable adjustment you describe is already present, even if not enough in amplitude.
The thing about profit sharing that bothers me is it reminds me of a sales job where you go out and pitch a product the customer orders with the company and then the company tells you how much they ordered and here is your commission.
That little part about how many orders I made is really up to the company and in la la land. Now I think our profit sharing is on more firm ground than that but I'll never trust it.
If you want to go outside the box, when I was a corporate pilot I was also a sales guy. I managed what charters we did and ran the risk of achieving my goal was to get about 30 hours a month or blowing it by turning down bad trips. I was paid a nice base salary and then a per hour 'commission' off the hours I flew in which the boss made money. The boss was no idiot, he was an immigrant with a 6th grade education now worth about a half a billion dollars. He understood how to motivate people and by tying my income to his, we were on the same page- just like any other sales job. The current system industry wide doesn't put the employee and employer on the same page.
I don't advocate changing an established system but if you told a 5th year pilot (any plane) he'll make $50,000 a year base salary and $.35 per available seat per hour then it'd work out like this:
5th year = $50,000. Then MD88 pilot flies 150 passengers. 150pax x $0.35 = $52.5/flight hour. Pilot flies 70 hours a month (840 in a year). So $50,000 + $52.5 x 840 = $94,100.
$94,100 equals $112.02/flt hr, but currently 5th year 88 FO is $92.57.
Now what happens when times our bad, shrink hours available and pilot costs decrease. If things are bad then you're stuck furloughing.
What about reserve pilots, they get $X per day that they're available whether used or not or the higher of the flight hours flown.
If the company is doing well, surcharges per hour.
That'd be a system flexible to the business environment. Not what we have now. But that's just what I've done and seen not what's practical given the dinosaur nature of our industry today.