it definitely gives a little “Rome is burning” vibe. And to know that the post was approved by a full social media team before she hit the post button.

 

If the one month of GS pay error was the only issue with pay, then I agree with you.

Reference the bold above, if figuring out pay isn't very difficult, then why can't Delta, a Fortune 100 company, figure it out? Why are there thousands of STS cases for rotation guarantee, or RR pay, or premium pay???

 

Give me a break, Trip. Never said one negative thing about her. She probably had permission to post and film, so it is what it is.

You missed the point entirely. I’ve had tens of thousand of dollars not paid to me on time that should’ve been. And the only reason I was eventually paid is because I knew the PWA and submitted pay inquiries. There is simply no excuse for it, and when I keep getting told that pay transparency is a top priority (yet pilots still keep getting shorted), it irks me to see resources dedicated to building a vegetable garden at the GO so corporate employees can relax in between games with their coworkers. Maybe they could help CT answer a phone before I time out.

Delta didn’t ID the GS issue. Pilots did. Lots of fiddling going on while the operation burns on the other side of the 08/26 runways.

 

Paying your people correctly such that they don't pay service to check their checks, is an extremely basic function of an employer. What you make had so bearing on that.

 

The cynic in me, which takes a lot to come out, says they may be hoping a new, quick contract wipes those all away with a few signatures on said deal.

 

I think there are enough harmed pilots currently in the system that if this were the case & it was presented to the group, it would be swiftly voted down. It would take an other-worldly level of compensation to get a majority on board with something like that.

 

No, you're missing the point. It doesn't matter how much someone is making if the system is broken and we're not being paid what we earned.

This latest pay issue took 2 weeks to sort out, after PILOTS discovered the problem and flooded them with pay inquiries. The company did not identify the problem before pay was sent out. The core of the issue is that pilot pay audits are not automated in any way shape or form, several years after we were told pay accuracy was a "top priority". This particular issue was VERY simple too, it did not take calculus to discover. If you pulled up your timecard next to your PAS, the PAS was clearly missing a line of GS pay that was on the timecard. You could write a script to check 17k of these in a few minutes. Why aren't these caught before they're sent out?

I've had 24 pay inquiries over the last 3 years, all of them paid in my favor. Some on the first try, some on the third try. That inconsistency is another problem, if the first look is still denying mistakes that are clear as day.

I've talked with plenty of other pilots who say they've never had a pay mistake...I ask them how they know...and they say every paycheck looks about right compared to the last month. This is a terrible method and often hides issues due to taxes, SS being turned on/off, reroutes, etc. On two occasions now I've offered to go through someone's last 12 months of PAS during cruise who swore they had no mistakes, and both times I found several errors they missed.

The biggest problem is that out of 17k pilots, how many of them are pay experts actually finding every error? Less than half? So how much money has the company pocketed that will never be recovered because no one looked?

The new contract absolutely needs pay penalties. Such as anything not self-identified and corrected by the company after a certain number of days pays x% extra per day. And how about every approved pay inquiry pays the pilot an extra ADG for their time. This won't even cost negotiating capital, because the company can't claim fixing pay costs XXX millions of dollars, because they'd be admitting to wage theft. All the gains in the contract mean nothing if they're not paid correctly.

 

These are great points. The volume of incorrect pay incidences you’ve experienced makes me wonder how much money I’ve let slip through the cracks under the assumption that the company is both operating in good faith & also competent at their jobs.

In short, I’m dumb.

 

After reading the MEC Chairman’s letter this morning, I had a thought that I’m sure will end up drawing a lot of spears from the APC crowd.

As previously discussed here, the letter talks about how Flight Ops has tried to pin previous disruptions on us and have waged a sort of internal PR campaign to malign pilots as greedy/lazy/other negative adjectives.

I’ve seen plenty of people here say something to the effect of “since the company is treating us this way, you’re not going to see me hand out a single card or do anything that’s not mandated in 14CFR/PWA/etc…”

I think the letter presents a counter-narrative that talks about how we’ve “continued to lead” by taking care of people and doing some of those very small very simple extraneous things many pilots love to hate.

It seems like the obvious counter to this campaign to malign pilots is not to become even more grumpy and curmudgeony, but to use the ol “kill em with kindness” routine. And by that I mean continuing to do just basic stuff like saying goodbye, handing out cards, flight deck visits, etc...

Obviously I say this within the context of maintaining unity first and foremost (e.g. if hats off becomes a thing then hats are most certainly off). I know this isn’t a popularity contest, but I don’t see the benefit to feeding a flight ops narrative that we’re difficult people by doing things that some people will perceive as being difficult.

inb4 “you’re a management plant/4th floor intern/whatever”. I’m all for extracting maximum value from the leverage we presently have. I’m just suggesting the most effective strategy might be to continue presenting ourselves in the positive way that many people currently view us. The best place to sight your artillery is often from the moral high ground.

Accepting spears.

 

I mean, where has "killing them with kindness" gotten us so far? For years we've done those extra things, and where is the goodwill from management in return? Fool me once (We ran a little hot), fool me twice (what's a SIL?), fool me three times (MOAB before VEOP), fool me four times (new improved pay promised for years), fool me five times (turning off the phones during crowdstrike), fool me six times (claiming that pay errors are rare), fool me seven times (claiming that CS hold times average ~3 minutes), fool me eight times (23m7/IA fiasco), fool me nine times (trying to unilaterally change how PB days are calculated ), fool me ten times (yanking ability to use PB days), fool me eleven times (critically short staff the airline then blame pilots for the implosion when we've been picking up record overtime), fool me twelve times (max blasting of SC), fool me thirteen times (pre-posted rest to manipulate reserve grid and ignore seniority)…

Need I go on? Maybe one day we'll have people in charge of FLOPS who understand and respect our contributions to the operation, both at a base level and when we go above and beyond. But with the current group in change we can be as kind as baby bunnies and all that will do is make it easier to turn us into rabbit stew...