So, 2000 to 3000 seniority numbers are “junior”? Looking at all the IA’s awarded in the past 5 months says mostly these are the junior pilots. Who’s making the deals? You are right though, no one should be making any deals. They were being made, however, and anyone junior to those numbers weren’t getting anything. Thanks

From the Policy Manual:

Any proposed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), or other agreement that does not modify the PWA, shall be subject to the following approval process: The MEC will be provided a minimum 96-hour opportunity to review the terms of the MOU. Should a majority of MEC members object to an MOU, it will be added to the agenda for the next MEC meeting for consideration of ratification. The MEC may determine by majority vote that a particular MOU be subject to membership ratification.

From that you can infer:
1. A majority did not object
2. A majority did not support MEMRAT

The problem from the company’s perspective wasn’t the IAs, it was auto-accept. And we gave up nothing on that. There’s just now order to the chaos that honors seniority and should end most of the deal making. IAs were already the easy button. We have just replaced it with something more palatable to most of the pilot group. We still have a bunch of leverage because the company is having to pay 3x to cover trips in many cases.

I'm neither excited, nor upset about the MOU. However, what did it do to ensure that the company will start coverage ASAP, rather than let it sit for hours, or until the 8 hour window where they can blast a QS? What did it do to ensure that once the acc/ack window has ended, ARCOS moves on immediately to speed up the coverage, rather than let it sit there for an hour while other below wait for the call? These were just as much of a problem as anything else.

Yeah I'm curious how it plays out. Cautiously optimistic though. The incentive for them to run coverage earlier is avoiding paying 3x for the same trip vs 2x as a greenslip. Is that a big enough incentive? Maybe, maybe not 😂

We already have proof that paying 3x is not enough incentive. All the IA’s going out will now be QS’s. Company still paying 3x, pilots that have no intention of flying won’t get nuisance calls, and the pilots that want to fly won’t have to sit on hold for 15-20 minutes to talk to a scheduler to get a trip that may or may not be available. They’ll just say they want it in Arcos and wait 12 minutes to see if they get it. There will be transparency again which is a good thing.

I would have liked to see everyone in a missed coverage step paid something instead of just senior pilot.

what leverage did we have over the company that we could have used in negotiations? if the company doesn’t care who gets paid the 23m7, what incentive can we provide for them to fix it that isn’t a concession elsewhere?

Well other than solving a manufactured crisis for the company, I will have to make a choice between premium pay and QOL that I never had to. We lost negotiating capital for a poor solution and gave up QOL if you were a GS auto accept user. The company is once again incentivized to reinvent the processes and norms we knew as normal PWA apparatus. Instead of defending precedent we rewrite them into compliance. Again.

Why? Because GS is cheaper. That’s why. If it goes green, there is no 23M7 pilot, because the white steps don’t have a taker.

I think an underappreciated new deterrent to skipping GS now is they have to ID and pay the 23m7 pilot before the system will let them skip. I imagine they were not actually paying 300% many times previously, whereas now they will have to.

That said, I wish all 300% went to the person doing the work, rather than the #1 person getting 100% every time. This would have eliminated the m7 fishing altogether and properly paid the person deserving the money for putting up with the inconvenience of not having auto accept and being woken up all the time.

Also, still haven't seen an answer to how things will be until the QS automation is done. Will the first come first served IAs continue until then?