Originally Posted by gloopy

We should be in the business of running an airline not pandering to attention monger analcysts. Although I suppose if we can spin what we're doing anyway as bowing down to their penut gallery demands and that makes them feel good and some crackberry day trader who contributes nothing to society slides his paramaters in a direction that causes a short term bump in our stock then who cares I guess.

As for the AE, I don't see any negative movement whatsoever in terms of reductions of categories. If there are new categories (330 ATL, etc) there will of course be localized bumps and ripples as with any new category but that's not what people are worried about WRT the so called 10% pulldown at issue here.

IMO I don't think even the bad managers among our ranks are dumb enough to credibly suggest, much less implement, a training bloodbath from a short term market overaction only to immediately have to undo it as soon as its completed due to the inevitable need to fat staff those very same categories as we all know they will need to do. And I believe there are enough good managers (semi good?) to offset their pleas for short term quarterly cost cutting bonuses so they can buy themselves a little cookie at RMB of Atlanta at the expense of medium to long term business sense for the company as a whole. The sensibile ones won the last round when we didn't furlough through the panic of 08-09 and that was clearly not only the right decision but it saved us significant expense as well as enabled us to rake in significant profits we wouldn't have been able to do had we followed the advice of the know nothing reactionaries and IMO this is the exact same thing here WRT the current staffing of the widebody flying.

Now we may "see the results" in the next AE by what it doesn't have, as opposed to what it has. We will probably see little to no positions in the higher categories not including transfers relative to new ones of course. But any reduction would be extremely expensive and would have to immediately be reversed almost the second it was completed and as an added bonus we could be caught flat footed and unable to capture revenue if things improve just like last time. In addition to that, when the retirement wave really starts to crest, any thinning out they do now could be catestrophic later. That is, unless we offer another post retirement thingy, but even then it just doesn't make sense.

In the meantime the company is all but declaring war on us on the eve of negotiations by barfing every single large RJ they can and signing on every foreign code share they can even as we face continued stagnation and the response from them and the union (by the tone of what they say as well as the content they do not say) clearly screams "a contract is a contract! nah nanny nah nah!" and we are supposed to think this is tactically wise and paving the way for "peace in our time" via constructive engagement or whatever. While I don't think we need a Dubinsky style approach at this time, we need to be turning up the heat a little bit when it comes to rhetoric over certain things because as it stands now, even if the company was hard core in love with this pilot group, if all we do is say "thank you sir may we have another!" can we really blame them for what they do to us?