Originally Posted by
Theoden
(I'm an XJ pilot) The year leading up to July 1, some Mesaba pilots were working more cancelled 9E flights than actual XJ flights. 9E was cancelling a lot of flights for crews. They would even swap multiple flights over to the same broken plane so as to make it look like a maintainence cancellation. (Apparently this is less embarrasing than stranding pax because they simply wouldn't or couldn't staff their airline.) Well anyway these cancellations by 9E were a big problem for Delta. If 9E had not have employed XJ furloughees, and if the aquisition had not happened, what do you think would have happened? One possibility would be an asset transfer from the carrier that could not operate those assets to a carrier that could. The point is that it did not hurt 9E pilots to have XJ furloughees come in house to help staff the logistical disaster that was 9E. It would have been far worse to resolve cancellations by transferring flying away from 9E. One wonders: why didn't 9E simply hire enough people all those years? In any event, those XJ furloughees are not displacing senior 9E pilots and are not hurting 9E in general. In fact, their presense is a mutually beneficial event.
As for the first bolded part: Agreed. HOWEVER, they should have come just like any other newhire at Pinnacle: at the bottom of the list, with first year pay, no "carry in" longevity for pay, vacation, sick time. Although it's good for the XJ furloughee, it's a bunch of crap considering we have new hires starting at the same time at zero longevity, simply because they weren't furloughed Mesaba? I knew furloughed pilots from other airlines who wanted Pinnacle, some got it, but all started at bottom of list with zero longevity and first year pay. Our union negotiated this behind our backs, we had no knowledge this was happening. We just got a surprise when we found out, and several FOs raised a little racket about this. And, it IS unfair. Consider a newhire in summer of 2010. He'll get first year pay, 25.92/hr. No vacation credit, no sick credit, etc. Zero longevity. Now consider a XJ furloughee who started just a week before. He is already raking in 2nd year pay (some maybe even 3rd year pay), even though he started nearly the same time as the other newhire FO? Both at the bottom of the list, both started at about the same time at PINNACLE Airlines, yet, we are giving one pilot lots of credit for time spent elsewhere (read: Mesaba). Just because we bought them does not mean favoritism starts. That's what the one-list is for. We can bring people over or give them proper credit once there is one list. But until then, with two separate lists, Pinnacle and Mesaba are two DIFFERENT airlines. ANYONE starting at Pinnacle needs to start at the bottom of the seniority list with zero longevity. This MOU irked more than a few pilots at Pinnacle, and got quite a long thread in airlinkpilots about it. But, as usual, the pilot group couldn't do much about it.
As for the second bolded part: Because Phil T and his gang are retards. When it came to staffing, management had their heads up their you-know-what. Last year, they consistently blamed the cancellations on our "increased use of sick time" without ever admitting we were just plain damn short of pilots. They even want as far as instilling a draconian sick-call policy. Now their staffing model (or lack thereof) has come to bite them in the rear end. It's just business as usual for 9E, a day of cancellations due to lack of crew is a day like any other.