Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
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.
I'm not a huge fan of the profit-sharing as a panacea, and yet I'm also not opposed to the idea of seeing a more automatic and faster system for adjusting pay around a baseline, when times are good and bad. I'd rather let payrates fluctuate than cough up workrules when times are bad.
The fact we don't control the books, however tells me the imperfect system where we have to sign up for 3-4 years of a contract based on the past and present, amybe the system we're stuck with. I've never seen any alternatives. Maybe a six-year contract that fixes the big items, with a short renegotiation window on a few (specific) items every two years? I don't know how we could make something like that work in our favor because the RLA makes getting to the illusion of a strike so very, very lengthy. After all, the stated prupose of the act was stability, and stability they got.
So I don't feel super strongly either way. I'm open to better ideas, in terms of deciding how we base our proposals, and how we account for economics ups and downs... if they're out there.
...
On that note, you're all sort of like brothers form another mother to me, but I think I'm going to prioritize the actual family over the virtual kind for a few days... so Happy Thanksgiving to all.