When I checked out in the right seat of the 767 in January of 1989, they sent us up to Toronto, to use Air Canada's 767 sims. And we had D periods. The beer in the trunk of the rental car was nearly frozen by the time we got to it! :eek:

When I checked out in the left seat of the 767 in Sept. 2000, they sent us to Miami, the Pan Am training center, with those nice C periods, out in time to hit the clubs on South Beach! :D

Great fun that! Beats the heck out 30 days on Va. Ave, and Spondivits.

I'm not taking sides here, but when you hold the levers of power, as our executives do, those dollars are not as 'at risk' as our profit sharing is. They have made it their singular goal to be a blue chip transport stock, and every decision they have made has been to effect that change, such as pumping profits into stock buybacks. We have no such power over the stock price.

Indeed. Remember, the whole reason they put off hiring for a year was to keep costs down, show some huge earnings numbers and drive the stock price up, to get back onto the exchange. So now they've got a pilot shortage and have to give out a lot of greenslips?

Well...what did they think was going to happen?

This is interesting.....

That is why we shouldn't be paid in stock. We have virtually no control in the stock price so why tie our compensation to that? I also feel that way about profit sharing. While the check is nice and it feels like extra pay, I would gladly take an extra 6-7% each month in my hourly rates.

If you add up the ownership of indirect shares listed as owned by wife it comes to 1,211,923 shares. At current prices it's around 44 million dollars.

That would be nice... but.... stock grants can be "hidden" from Wall Street, and not show up as having our hourly rates out of whack with the other pilots that have yet to jump us and reset the bar. I get the reason for getting the profit sharing as part of our pay, but I think the gun was jumped a bit. Look at the industry. I think furloughs, bankruptcy and all that garbage are well behind us. The threat of profit sharing being taken down a bad road is very minimal. imho.

Virgin America has had something similar although not with professionals. I think you can put in a profile and they will pair you up with a compatible seat partner. This one looks like Delta could actually charge a good premium for that seat. Is kind of interesting.

Well, I am reminded of an outstanding ALPA article called "The Do's and Dont's of Negotiating." Every pilot should read it, and we would all be less inclined to knee-jerk refer to our MEC and negotiators as "sellouts" "wimps" etc every time we didn't get everything we ever wanted and then some.

One of the "Dont's" was "Don't set unrealistic goals. Otherwise you will inevitably be disappointed." So, pre-C2K we had to negotiate pay rates for the 777. We opened with $346/hr. We ended up "settling" for $265/hr (slightly more than it pays today, 14 years later!). We also got a 6% pay raise for everyone on the property and immediate elimination of the B-scale.

It was a great agreement, and set a lot of groundwork for C2K. But the "just say no" crowd would not have a minute of it. They were so focused on our opener that they STILL thought of us as "sellouts" "wimps" and the like. It was feel-good chest-thumping that only makes sense written on the bathroom stalls, but somehow that mindset has been accepted as "keeping it real" "protecting the profession" and the like. It is not.

So, what would I like to see? I would like to see a min pay per day of 5.30-6 hours. I would CERTAINLY like to see vacation and CQ days pay much more (and that IS "realistic"). But like I told someone else, we all say "higher min day pay" and act like we will get it and all our trips will look identical or better than they currently do, and some min-pay-per-day fairy will magically sprinkle some more hours on to the trips we currently fly, and everything else remains as is. Probably not. My guess is if we went to 6+ hours a day min pay, you would see most domestic trips look like the NYC trips--completely non-commutable on both ends, and then you can imagine the outcry when that happened!

Another "Do" was "DO realize that negotiating is hard work, and preparation is key" (or something similar). But how could that be? If you believe a lot of message boards, negotiating should be the easiest thing in the world. You have no need to cost anything out, examine the company's position, operations, numbers, competition, business plan, etc, etc. You just walk in, slap down your opener, then head to the nearest pub to down a few until the company calls and says "sounds good, where can we sign?"

Hey, we need more--lots more. I am just on board with our current MEC approach, were we get lots and lots of modest improvements on a fairly continuous basis. It may not make headlines, but it HAS made our lives better--pay rates are getting there, the DPSP is up to 15% contributions, vacation slide, bidding for CQ, pos space deviate from DH on either end of a trip (I know you like that feature) etc etc. None of those things just magically appeared. They were the result of hardworking committees who kept things low-key and "realistic." But they have been real improvement.

Good post Herk