My seniority date starts in Feb of 2014. I wasn't hired under the JCBA. I'd be pretty ****ed if APA decided to retroactively apply a contract provision that wasn't in effect at the time and strip me of 2-3 months of seniority. I chose a later class date because I could (I was 10 out of 25 in my class) and because it didn't matter.

 

Guys, no one is going to go back and apply a JCBA provision to what you were working on under the MOU...

The APA AND the Company are now forced to figure out how to INTEGRATE all of us who were hired Jan 14 until the OCC Date applied to both groups. How they do that is the question.

 

I emailed the phl reps a few days ago and still haven't gotten a response.

 

Just a thought, but shouldn't the proposals in play dictate the potential methodology considerations for your segment of pilots, especially that by your own committee? To wit, when does your longevity component start.......when you could have attended new-hire indoc or when you did attend new-hire indoc ?

On the LAA side, a thousand furloughees chose to exercise their contractual right to defer recall because they could and in their understanding, it too didn't matter. The AE flows weren't even given a choice of attending their assigned indoc class, others decided that for them for their benefit, not the flows.

 

He could be talking aircraft class date. Seniority is assigned day 1 at indoc, and then depending on what plane you get you could pick a later starting aircraft class date. Makes 0 difference as your seniority is already assigned.

 

Perhaps. I got the impression he was concerned about a conflict between when he could have started and when he chose to based on ground rules he thought existed at the time. It should be obvious to all of us, the committees feel it fair game to change those rules in their proposals and apply new rules now in the way THEY think they should be played.

 

That's not what was implied in the email (or in what the neg chairman said at the BOD meeting.)

He is quoted as saying something to the effect of "LUS pilots are being paid incorrectly-due to their date of hire." As you know, LUS never used an "occupational date." That was strictly an LAA thing. At LUS, the seniority date was only one thing. There were never two separate dates.

I too have expressed my concerns to the reps. I have not heard any real clarification either.

Sure looks to me like they are trying to apply the JCBA retroactively. The contracts we were hired under do not have the term "occupational date" anywhere I can find. I see no provision for anything other than the one seniority date.

I sure would like to see something in writing which applies this logic to LUS people hired pre-JCBA. Looks to me like a very creative interpretation of a document which didn't exist at that point. In other words-I see no other position for this other than an attempt at a retroactive application of something that didn't exist for over a year for some people.

 

APA wants to change our seniority date to mesh with their new hires except they also want to take money out of our hands. Pretty f'ed up representation.

I'm all for a fair meshing of the groups, US guys on property after the AA guys shouldn't go in front of them, but there should be a better way of doing it vs. taking money out of the represented pilots hands.

And if you do it for us, you'd need to do it for the entire US pilot group as well.

 

Plus, they need to show us something in writing showing that the policy was somehow in place before the JCBA.

Maybe it is out there in some side letter or something. I sure would like to see it.

If they can't cough something up, they are gonna have to deal with some unhappiness. I am willing to fight this one.

 

He's not talking about indoc; he's talking about aircraft training. If you're not physically attending an indoc class, then your seniority isn't based on that indoc class. However, once class starts, you have a choice of which aircraft training slot you want. At LAA, your choice mattered, because OCC date was based on the anticipated completion of training; if you chose a later class, you had a later OCC date. LUS pilots didn't have to factor that into their decision, since US used the industry standard of starting seniority when you report to class.

As for furloughs exercising their right to defer, the fact is that that's not going to hurt them under any of the committee's proposals, because none of the proposals reorder the pre-merger lists. The ones who could be affected by that decision, depending on the arbitrators' award, are the people hired to fill the slots that they chose not to return to. Rather than giving two people credit for each of those jobs (the furloughee who deferred and the new hire/flow through who took their place), the East and West proposals only give credit to one person for each job. The effect of this is not to move the furloughed pilots down, but to move their replacements down.

Similarly, not giving the flows LOS credit for the time that they didn't, you know, work for American, doesn't harm them; their place on the LAA list is already set and won't be reordered. Rather, it would have the effect of moving new hires, who only had a job BECAUSE the flows were held, down the list; again, only giving one person credit for each job available.

But then, I think you already know all of this.