I don't know whether to be more impressed with your pessimism about them agreeing to a program that can give both sides efficiency out of spite or your optimism that if they were ever going to agree to it in negotiations that they would simply hand control over to the union for free outside of them.

I'm an outsider, but the comparisons some of you draw are interesting to me. "They have full control because it's in the contract, thus they will never agree to anything else." By that logic they won't ever agree to anything that isn't current book. I guess that makes your negotiating position easy.

Union doesn't need to control PBS.

Contract must specify that...

Paramters are defined contractually before implementation, to the extent possible.

PBS Implementation will have full union oversight, and union will have full veto authority if it's not working out.

Any tweaks approved during implementation become contractual. Future tweaks of ANY parameter require either contractual allowance or union concurrence.

Contractual rules about pairing construction, or just let the union build pairings. That can be done within certain parameters defined by the company, but avoids stupidly wasteful pairings which result from sheer laziness of staff (seen that before).

PBS can be be win-win, you just have to fence off the territory in PBS where the company could achieve a windfall by abusing the system at the expense of the pilots. And it's not really rocket science, most airlines have PBS so there are plenty of examples to learn from (both good and bad).

Do we have to get "FULL" control of PBS or just a strong say, with contractual safeguards as to how the schedules are built?

If the negotiated contract language regarding scheduling and QOL provisions are solid or at least comparable to the rest of the industry, wouldn't that dictate how the algorithms are programmed into whatever PBS software we end up with?

Sure, like all the other airlines, they might try to unfairly stretch the boundaries of the contract interpretation to their advantage, but hopefully it will be solid enough to prevent that kind of exploitation or at least result in meaningful repercussions if they do.....

Curious if anyone could shed more light on this....

That's some serious jedi mind trick right there, it's like you knew the collective question we all had in our minds. hahaha

Great insight.. Thanks for the explanation.

How ‘bout we move the PBS/Line Bidding discussion to its own home and leave this to the poor fella that wants to know about JB/AS. I should have known better than to mention PBS. Rookie mistake.

That’s because there is nothing positive to say about Alaska, plain and simple- and yes other airlines are leaps and bounds better by a large margin.. our contact isn’t even remotely close to our peers... our contract is even subpar to most regional contracts. The minute that there is something positive to say about Alaska, I will gladly say it.

If you believe that there's NOTHING + to say I would say that you are cynical, naive, and haven't worked at other airlines. Needing improvements in many disparate areas - yes.

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New hires now holding LGB

There is no way in hell I would go to jetBlue in your situation. Take it from me, I was in a small base in NY with VX and small bases are easy to close. I now commute trans-con and hate every minute of it. If I get 4 trips a month as a more junior lineholder, that's 4 commutes of 8-9 hours each way or between 64-72 hours a month just getting back and forth to work mostly in middle seats and jump seats. jetBlue may be the better airline in a lot of ways, but bases is not one of them in your situation. Don't get stuck in my situation and do everything you can to avoid even the possibility of a transcon commute in your future.

I understand that other than some churn at the very bottom, nobody ever leaves... so seniority progression would depend on upgrades, which mostly depend on retirements (maybe there will be attrition over the next few years). I personally never applied to JB for that reason, and also due to the risk of being in the only west coast base, and a small one at that. But somebody from JB could elaborate on that better than I.

There is no conceivable difference between JB and AS which would cause me to do a transcon commute long-term, or even risk having to do one long-term.