Speaking of our enhanced productivity and lost jobs as a result --

I'm surprised nobody has commented on DALPA's latest innovation. "VACATION ANY"

That little gem is going to cost us another several hundred jobs.
Forget spring hiring. Maybe now we can avoid hiring until fall of 2014.

With this latest "improvement" to PBS we can now move those pesky vacations out of the way and pack more trips onto our lines in vacation months. What a great deal! Just break up the vacation and stick it on any left over individual days when we aren't flying anyway. Pretty much the same as the old "vacation sell back" but without all the embarrassment of actually selling it back.

What is DALPA thinking? Is this really what the membership wants? Fly to the FAR's? Eliminate vacations?

Don't guys realize the correlation between this stuff and displacements?

I am thoroughly disgusted with this trend of destroying jobs in the name of more productivity and more flight hours per month. We are never going to see any advancement on our list if DALPA keeps coming up with these things.
Is it really a good thing to have 20 years as a first officer before the first chance to upgrade? Our union has lost its way.

Maybe its just me (and apparently Timbo) who would like to go back to the old motto --

MORE MONEY MORE TIME OFF !

 

"To each his own" and "mind your own business" comes to mind. Just think of all the money the company has saved having pilots willfully "move" to fund staffing of aircraft at particular bases without requiring the company to pay for it. Closing MEM and moving the flying to NYC comes to mind. In that way, a commuter clause comes off as a very cheap exchange.

 

OK, but fair warning: I can eat enough Gyoza to make you airsick!

Carl

 

with a public attitude like that you're going to get your FOQA data audited.

 

Hasn't everyone???!!!

 

No, the company did not "change" our contract. It WAS our new contract that we the pilots voted for. It still WAS the status quo, painful as it was.

ALPA could NOT do that. The RLA is very specific. A union (or company for that matter) cannot authorize "self help" until very specific points in time. You MUST have been sent to a 30 day cooling-off period--from a NMB mediator--and then that must have come to its expiration. Then and only then can the union explicitly state "we are directing a withholding of service, and we are defining that as no green slips until further directed."

ANYTHING else is illegal. Sorry, that is the RLA for you. But it works both ways. I remember when Leo Mullin was CEO and he was pushing Congress for "baseball style arbitration" in the RLA and remove the ability for unions to strike. It was a blatant anti-labor move. The words had hardly left Mullin's mouth when you could hear (then ALPA president ) Duane Worth sputtering all the way from Herndon, VA. "This is anti-labor" (which was true) but even more telling, Worth reiterated over and over "the RLA has worked well for many decades, almost all contracts are resolved without labor needing to strike and/or mgmt needing to lock-out/hire replacements" etc etc and "the RLA has served the aviation industry well for decades, and thus there is no reason to change it." (emphasis added)

So what does that mean? If we are under the umbrella of the RLA, we have to adhere to ALL the provisions of it--not just the ones that are convenient to us today. That means NO self-help, no grass-roots "hey don't fly GS this month" or "hey, lets all call in sick" (a la the APA and their sickout) unless specifically and clearly called for by your union leadership as explicitly permitted by the RLA--as excruciating as that might be at times.

By the way, that does not mean that you MUST fly O/T. I have flown 4 GS in 16+ years. I didn't even dream of flying a GS while we had guys on the street. I don't know if that really brought them back any sooner than they otherwise would have anyway, but I just couldn't look myself in the mirror and accept a premium pay trip while we had guys furloughed--just couldn't do it.

What it does mean is that if a guy is flying as the contract allows, you can't leave nastygrams in his file, post his schedule on some bulletin board etc, just because you don't like it. If it is truly that bad, then petition your union to change the contract. (This by the way is a whole different scenario than someone who performs struck work, which makes him a scab. But again, there should never be any doubt as to what formally defined struck work is).

This is a tough one. No one--DALPA included--was happy with this program. But the bottom line is that hundreds of senior pilots all retired simultaneously to protect their lump sums. Absent the PRP (Post Retirement Pilots) program numerous widebody categories would have just shut down--no amount of GS, AEs, etc, would have helped. ALPA did a good job limiting the program to just as few pilots as possible, made all of them junior to the plug non-retired guy in every category, and put a finite timeframe on it. Again, no one liked it, but it was the "least bad" option at a really crappy time. And yes, we bailed out an imcompetent mgmt team.

 

Carl, you are semi correct. I was illustrating a no growth scenario and the fact that as a pilot group we decide how to divide the spoils. I will add that it would take a huge push to change the direction of the ship, pilots seem to be very reluctant to change.

 

Really! Everyone on here says we are money ***** and that the company depends on us to pick up extra flying. We have a handful of SLI's and thy only fly the line one month a year (maybe two). Either way, if hiring did occur and new hires were getting training all the FO's that were to fly with those LCA are now able to pick up more flying.....ie white slip on top of original trip for GS pay or GS on top of original trip for triple pay!!
I find your rumor or reasoning flawed.

 

I am not sure what your objection is. First, Vacation Any came about because of the Scheduling Optimization Team's recommendation, and specifically it was a very popular feature at pre-merger NW. It was largely due to the PMNW pilots' inputs that we have Vacation Any at all.

Further, do you even understand how it works? Under Vacation Any, you will still have just as many vacation days in your bid month as you do now, and they will STILL count towards your PBS calculation for a full month.

What it DOES do is give more guys a chance at either a better regular line, or a regular line at all. Here is a great example.

A guy has his third (tertiatry) week of vacation in mid-February. He doesn't really care about vacation that month, whether this week or that; that is just where it ended up because he is fairly junior. In fact, he hops back and forth from regular to reserve lines due to his "juniority." Prior to Vacation Any, perhaps his vacation week was posted over the only days where there were still trips remaining in the PBS pot--but because he had vacation then, he gets a reserve line. Again, he doesn't care where his vacation really ends up.

Or....in a similar situation, let's say that there are some really good trips that he would like to fly, but again, his vacation days overlap the days of those trips. Vacation Any would fix both situations. Now PBS can move his vacation anywhere in the month, and even split it up IF NECESSARY (and only if necessary) to get the guy what he wants.

Vacation Any gives pilots more flexibility to get more of what they want, more of the time. How is that bad? I think if you give it a few months you will find that it will be a very very good thing.

 

Uh...our SLIs fly a full month on the line one month out of every three. Anything else is the exception and not the rule.