Again youve decided the putt will miss before weve even swung. You go into mediation, both sides get told where theyre wrong (company included) and you move to the next negotiating point. Youve already decided what they'd do. This business where the company going to get a revenue nuetral contract during record profits is insane.

However, Alpa is crazy. Got it. You still ****ed at Alpa because they won't invite you to sit at the negotiating table? Maybe they should give you all the negotiating notes so you can pass them to us online? Next time I hope they show up and ask for 10 billion just to blow a fuse in your brain.
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Interest based bargaining (IBB) is a framework to reign in labor demands. If the RLA constraints were removed and there was real power on both side there would be more timely deals and openers would be more reasonable because you are actually bargaining for a specific time frame and not an open end undefined contract duration. IBB focusses on solving managements "problems." It's been the buzz word of choice for going on 3 decades now. All the training focuses on problem solving and mutual benefit which is great but the meat of a contract, pay and work rules, will always be in opposition which is why they are last and take the longest.

 

Im all for getting out of the RLA, but how long have pilots been barking up that tree? We are in the RLA for now, thats not changing soon. How much time you wanna spend wishing and hoping? Unless something has moved tectonically in washington we're under the RLA for the next 100 years.

 

There was no such discussion of the company demanding a revenue neutral contract. Had we opened for 1.5 billion in improvements I suspect we would have had a agreement ontime. In a lounge meeting I listened as the company acknowledged the contract would be expensive. The December ask however was beyond expensive. If we had completed a agreement it almost certainly would have extended all furlough protections to all pilots on the property. That would be a big item at the moment.
To many pilots focus on the union parroting the company had only offered 25 million in improvements. The rest of the story however was that 25 million was not in the contract sections where the expensive items reside. The 25 million was the so called throwaway sections of the contract. Union communications should have read something like this. “To date the company has only offered 25 million in improvements in section 5,6, 13 and 16”. That’s not how communications I read phrased things.

 

That may be true, but the fact they only got through that much of the contract, never really even tacking the hard stuff should tell you how difficult the company was being.

Ask your contacts what their section 23 proposal looked like...

 

We are constrained by the RLA. My point was that IBB is a further constraint because we have to solve managements problems first and then resort to traditional bargaining for our "problems" (pay and work rules) it has always been this way and as every negotiation starts the IBB rhetoric is trotted out. All that does is draw out the time line so the meat of the agreement isn't even discussed until managements problems are addressed. It's a joke traditional bargaining will always close the deal.

 

Oh Christ look how defense he gets folks. Negotiating started most responses with some variation on "what sre you willing to give up for blah". And lets face facts, if youve been on this industry long enough and met the people for negotiating teams theyre never guys like you and me looking to just shortcut to the end and go back to work. These are comically obtuse people who really believe if they ask for something crazy theyll get it. Management gets the same kinda folks.

I dont care that you'd do thing different my annoyance is you're assertion the unions way wouldnt work and pretending they were screwing everything up. You have to let negotiators do what theyre doing, the NMB will give you guidance and the union will follow it. Management will too. We were never going to be done on time, it was a stupid promise only neophytes believe in. Give the volunteers a break and let them work.
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There is currently no work being done. When the work does start we will have gone from a outstanding negotiating environment to a poor one. Reality is starting to set in for some but at this point delaying as long as possible and holding on to our current contract is probably as good as it will get. The question is how long will the NMB let us stall.

 

Except that’s not at all what happened.


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You know the company has no interest in resuming section 6 talks right now too, right?


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