Originally Posted by tennisguru

From ALPA merger policy:

"The date of hire shall be the date upon which a pilot first appears upon the Company’s payroll as a pilot and also begins initial operational training required to perform such duties in airline operations."

From day one if indoc, after we filled out all the requisite forms, we were in the Pinnacle HR (payroll) system. We had employment verification records and employee numbers. It has been this way for everyone hired. If you are going to argue that Pinnacle pilots should be forced to use our original DOH, how do you reconcile the fact that all checkrides were done without regard to seniority? You would have pilots jumping other pilots in their class with greater seniority simply because they finished training first. This would violate ALPA merger policy in a way more blatant fashion than your claim that using our class date as our DOH would. If you want to use our original DOH for the merger, then you would not be "following the ALPA merger policy to the letter" as you claim should be done because in the end pilots would jump ahead of other pilots after the SLI who were originally senior to them. If you are going to argue that original DOH follows ALPA merger policy, then you would end up violating ALPA merger policy in the process.

The only way to reconcile this problem is to use the start of class at our DOH. The lists that Pinnacle submitted to the other merger committees from the very beginning has shown our amended DOH to reflect the start of class. Why now, after all arguments and rebuttals were supposed to have been finished, does Mesaba bring this up? They had months to contest our methodology.

The true test of all this will be to see how Bloch interprets this. I am quite confident that when all is said and done that he will complete the SLI using Pinnacle's class date as DOH. Any other way goes against employment case law, ALPA merger policy, and just plain common sense.