Originally Posted by
Reroute
Just out of curiousity, what was the standard of living that you expected when you got into this career in the first place. Which was your first major airline and what did they pay? Was it C2K? Was C2K industry leading or industry standard?
I expected a standard of living consistent with what had been established for decades for airline pilots flying for the largest major airlines. I had no doubt that, through hard work and perseverance, I could achieve my goal of flying for one of these carriers. It doesn't matter where any of us started or what they paid. The overall career is what matters, and I don't think it would have been reasonable for any of us to think that standard of living would be cut by about HALF. If you look at C2K, it could be said that it was simply a correction to a slow, downward trend in buying power that had been going on since deregulation. While C2K was technically the highest pay in the industry, it was only slightly above United and not all that much above AA. The lifestyle it provided was well within the range of "industry standard." I would certainly hope that no one representing Delta pilots would be advocating that this standard should be drastically and permanently lowered.
Originally Posted by
Reroute
In your experience negotiating contracts, when are economic goals announced? If UAL had announced there 2000 contract goals in 1998, would they have been less than what they announced after the Delta dot or more than? Just curious.
In 1998, UAL wasn't digging out of a ~50% hole. You simply cannot compare a traditional contract negotiation during normal times to a recovery from an unprecedented, massively devastated contract negotiated under extreme duress in bankruptcy. We are in uncharted waters... so any "experience negotiating contracts" is pretty much worthless in this situation, IMO. To make up the kind of lost ground we need to make up and get this profession back on track, it's going to take some bold, visionary leadership and absolute resolve. That sort of thing doesn't begin overnight when you're already to the start of a "section 6" negotiation. You have to lay the groundwork first by establishing your objective and getting everyone onboard and unified around that objective. This is basic management/leadership 101 stuff. And if you wait to do this until we get into section 6, I think we are almost certainly doomed to fail. Even worse, if you continue to make every excuse in the book for why this supposedly cannot happen, then not only are we doomed to fail, but I have to question whether this is even your objective in the first place.