boeingdvr

yep. Company does what it wants - Atlas pilots are just pawns... want real money- get out of the airline industry
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Voski

Or if you chose to stay in the airline industry, work for a company that doesn’t fly outsourced passengers or cargo. That includes namely FFD regionals & ACMI.

APCbot

What changed?

vroll1800

Where is a Like Button that I can smash for this words of wisdom post ?

JackStraw

Nothing changed; thats the problem. 17 of the 35 articles are yet to be agreed on and that’s going to take time for an arbitrator (alot longer than 1 or 2 months). Same thing happened the last contract.


This is precisely what the company wanted to happen.

BigJetBabyBucks

Arbitration is set to begin tomorrow. Grab the popcorn ... albeit a big bag, it might be awhile.

APCbot

I thought it wasn't until May?

RyeMex

Arbitration hearing runs March 17-31. The hope is that the ruling will be issued by sometime in May, but that’s speculation.

DC8DRIVER

Curious why you seem to think that it would take such a long time for an arbitrator to come up with a contract? We will have gone from maybe 3 to 6 actual negotiating days a month prior to arbitration, to 20 actual, progressive negotiating days a month with the arbitrator running the show. We are entering a very different era of contract negotiations under vastly different conditions.

And, in my 30 years of airline employment, I have NEVER seen union negotiators put out more information than this committee has. That being said, they should only put forth what union members actually need to see without showing their hand. Just as a purely hypothetical "for instance", say the union folks have an idea of what we would accept in a rational and realistic world, BUT management had planned to improve on what our NC was going to offer. We would have now lost all ability to improve on that aspect of our contract. For example, our NC was going to settle for 20 days a month off and the company was going to offer 21. How stupid would that be? Had our NC published that little gem for all to see, the company would have just won a valuable scheduling concession without even the slightest fight.

The NC knows what they are doing and I feel that they are being incredibly communicative and transparent about many things. But, there are a multitude of negotiating topics that they SHOULD NOT present to the pilot group. There are WAY too many "company men and women" out there to trust the group with the very same ammo that would end up being used against us.

wjcandee

But this is arbitration, meaning kind of like a court proceeding, where the arbitrator at the end makes a decision imposing a contract, rather than mediation, where the mediator gathers the opposing sides in a room and works with them to come to an agreement. So although there's always the opportunity for the parties to reach an agreement during the arbitration, that's not the goal of the proceeding. The proceeding presupposes that the parties will not be able to come to an agreement on their own, with or without a mediator's help, and that instead the arbitrator has to step in, and, based on the evidence, impose a contract.

in short, the two week schedule is a period in which both sides will be presenting their case, rather than negotiating per se.