This has been touched upon by others commenting recently. At LUS, they hired you into an indoc class. There was no pool. It was possible to defer, but that was something someone had to work out when called.

Once at indoc, seniority started on that day (as did your pay anniversary), and seniority within the class was further defined by age. The older, the more senior.

On day one, they passed out a sheet that had base assignments and class dates. Since seniority was already established, the class date one chose didn't matter. In fact, it was fairly common that all things being equal, the more senior guys in the class often chose the later class dates, since pay was guaranteed at 85 hours in training and that often gave people 1-2 weeks off in between indoc and the start of ground school with pay.

Fast-forward two years, and now APA is hinting that they would like to apply the OCC (LAA) model of determining seniority retroactively to all pilots hired after the POR (i.e., after December 9, 2013). So the guys who were hired at LUS and wound up being more senior in their class (like myself), who exercised that seniority to pick a base and/or class date that gave them time off or gave them a base they wanted, will now be penalized...all due to a contract that didn't exist at the time.

I can see how there's some legal authority to do that to people hired after the JCBA (and it still sucks), but I don't see how that's legal to retroactively apply that standard to a group of people that had absolutely zero expectation of said process being applied to them...in fact, during indoc, the training department stated that new hire seniority dates would likely be adjusted to DOH for everyone, rather than the archaic and overly complicated OCC system.

This would be the way to do it!

Would benefit everyone on the LAA side as well. (Plus, we were told to expect this method once things were ironed out.)

I never would have imagined some crazy retroactive JCBA garbage-not in a million years.

Before everyone gets too wound up, all this is in the JCBA and it should be no surprise it's going this way. But....

Pay is based on "classification date" not "occupational date". OD is seniority on the pilot's list and CD is for pay. Typically they're the same for LAA but they could adjust OD for LUS (or LAA ftm) to order the list without screwing with CD (as they should) and therefore pay steps.

One thing is for certain though, DOH would sure as hell be more simple moving forward and few will ever understand "why?".

The classification date is bogus.
Read the email from APA from yesterday you turkeys.
Don't get me started on the LAX guy either, but apparently LUS is going away

DOH would be eons simpler. It's almost as if LAA goes out of its way to find the most complex solution.

Not true. You need to understand more about seniority list integration and the inner folds of the working.

I was part of the 21Jul15 indoc class at DFW, we had the distinction of being the first class to have all of the LUS training done at DFW (we also had a 64 year, 11 month old Envoy flowthrough but that's a different story).

On day 2 or 3 we split off from our LAA brothers and sisters to a different room and the 12 of us "chose" our 190 training dates. We asked the folks present, the MD80/190 Fleet Manager (LUS pilot) and the training guy (former PHX training guy), what the New American uses for seniority and they said 21JUL, our DOH. The youngest guy in the class got the class that started four days after indoc and the senior folks sat at home for up to 8 weeks. Hahaha.

Obviously, we were under the JCBA, and I guess I should have read it cover to cover by day 3 but I hadn't. I'm more worried that the training people and fleet manager didn't know the correct answer as of Jul15. I didn't even know this was an issue until the email a few weeks ago. That being said, I'm happy to be here and I'm sure this will be just the first issue over a long career.

And that's exactly what we were told was happening on the LAA side while we were in indoc. on the LUS side!

This is the first union I've ever paid to attack me. Good times.

What? Why in the world would they allow someone within 1 month of retirement to flow to American. Also, the better question is, why in the world would he want to? Indoc isn't exactly a vacation.