Last I heard the union is presenting the compensation section to the company this week.

FA TA announced this week. So dispatch and FA are now TA'd. Pilots next?

In my opinion, we are a year at least a year out still. We are fighting for a minimum of industry standard, they don't want to give that otherwise this would have been done long ago. Money is the easy part, work rules are going to take much more pain.

what work rules are you asking for? I’m hearing the work rules have devolved into 0% unstack shenanigans again which is the last thing we need because it is totally outside of the industry. No pilot group has 0% unstack it’s an absurdity…but here we are.

We need LTD, min day pay, more days off, reserve protections, reassignment rules and true scheduling system (not the garage style CBI we use now). But I’ve heard that AR wants to stay with CBI and Merlot instead of moving to navblue which makes no sense - assuming that rumor is even true.

That’s not factual. Many have 0% unstacking bit they have staffing models to go along with it. But what’s your issue with it, it’s industry leading. If we have pure zero unstack it doesn’t matter which solver we use.

This has already been explained to him along with other misconceptions but never once have we seen any learning occur.

It's not the "0% unstack shenanigans." It's the 0% vs 100% shenanigans. It's not any more AR standing on 0% than it is the company standing on 100%. From what I have heard, neither is budging. As a pilot, you should be completely behind 0% if it's a binary decision. If the company gets 100%, it invalidates almost every other part of the scheduling section. If it's 0% or 100%, it HAS to be 0%. When the company comes around to getting off the 100%, we'll end up around 30% just like every other company that uses that metric.

As far as CBI/Merlot vs NavBlue, I don't know if that's what the union is pushing or not, but the reason they would be doing that is if we win the next arbitration in July, CBI will be the best for the pilots and require the largest increase in the pilot group. CBI is "dumb" but with the contract as written (not the way they execute it now) it will be the best solve for the pilot group. An actual algorithm is "smarter" and thus more efficient with scheduling which would result in fewer pilots needed to solve the schedule. (Read Leverage) Or at least that's the argument.

We should be more concerned that we just gave away a ton of leverage by agreeing to the "retention bonus."

The “retention bonus” is nothing more than pie in the sky at the moment though. Invisible money out there somewhere that I can’t touch. I don’t think it will sway people that were planning to leave from actually leaving. Most people have made their decision by now and will either stick it out or are already in the process of leaving.

the perception of the pilot group isn't what compromises leverage, but rather the perception of management of the "cost/value" of what they "already" "gave up". Right?

We've been saying this for months. It doesn't matter what contract management puts in front of the group, there will always be people chasing "greener grass".

More than likely, this retention bonus was something pushed by the mediator in an effort to get both sides to show that they are "bargaining in good faith".