Sick leave is middle of the pack, profit sharing cut, summer months shortened, reserve max higher, sanctioned sick leave harassment, 70 more jumbo RJ's, RAH scope abuse fixed by allowing it to continue, NRT minimums allowed to be lowered and the Atlantic JV out of compliance without a word from DALPA.

Progress!

Carl

When taken out of context, it can look pretty good. Actually, you prove my point. You're ignoring the 42% pay cut, loss of pension, thousands of jobs outsourced resulting in a full decade of severe stagnation. Even with those improvements, we're still stuck with pay rates that yield a 34% lower standard of living (without working a whole bunch extra to try and make up some of the difference).

See, if those things had never happened then you would be absolutely correct. But they did happen. DALPA has spent the past 10 years acting like we do not expect to restore our buying power. In other words, DALPA has spent the past 10 years acting like bankruptcy was a reset. And Lee Moak continues to make public statements that further reinforce that mindset.

You ignore the past and have no apparent intention to rectify it, then you are in effect accepting bankruptcy as a reset. There's really no other way I see to interpret that.

Unfortunately for us, I don't think that 50% in a single contract was ever doable, in spite of the fact that we certainly lost that much value in LOA46.

It did result in an overall raise of about $400M per year over 3 years. Last I heard, we cost about $2B a year, so that makes it about a 20% increase, or roughly a quarter of what you've been saying that full restoration would take. I'd call that more than a tiny dent.

I sure hope you're wrong, for all our sakes.

Zero. And if you keep trying to hit nothing but the far ones and it turns out that hitting was an unrealistic as you thought, how many points will you wind up with as compared to going after the closer ones?

The main problem with your analogy is that this is not some arcade game; it's real life. And there are men and women who have devoted countless hours, days, and years of their lives coming up with strategies to score as many points for us as possible and putting real money in our pockets and food on our families' tables. While they have not scored nearly as many points as you or I would have liked, they are far, far above zero.

A better question is why you have defended him.


January 31, 2011

Captain Lee Moak
President
Air Line Pilots Association, Int’l 1625 Massachusetts Ave., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036

Captain Tim O’Malley
Chairman
Delta Master Executive Council
100 Hartsfield Centre Parkway, Suite 800 Atlanta, GA 30354


Lee and Tim,
I wanted to take a moment to let you know that I recently responded to an outreach from Delta First Officer Tim Caplinger who contacted me in his capacity as the leader of the Delta Pilots Association.
I made it perfectly clear to Mr. Caplinger that in my opinion, a breakaway of the Delta pilots from ALPA would likely prove highly disadvantageous for the Delta pilots and destructive to our profession as a whole. When APA broke away from ALPA in 1963 the labor environment for airline pilots in the United States was far different than it is today. JFK was the President at the time and had recently come out strongly in favor of organized pilots in the Southern Airways dispute of 1962. American’s pilots prospered during the benign days of regulation, but that prosperity ended abruptly with the onset of deregulation.

I have always thought it is better to work within the existing political framework to achieve reform than by wreaking havoc upon one’s organization. After I was hired at American, I led the battle against the two-tier pay system – not by trying to tear things apart, but by working within the system. Ultimately, with patience and perseverance, we prevailed.

I also expressed my significant concerns about the law firm Mr. Caplinger’s group has enlisted as their counsel. The Allied Pilots Association had a previous relationship with the Seham law firm and eventually dismissed them. Shortly after the Sehams were dismissed at APA, they began coordinating with a pro-management dissident group at American called the AICA which has been trying to destabilize and decertify APA ever since. They are also involved on American’s property in a decertification effort with the TWU and were heavily involved with the disaster which occurred with the mechanics at Northwest.

I further recommended that Mr. Caplinger carefully evaluate his group’s present course of action. I know that institutional inertia is a difficult thing to overcome, however I think that a Delta breakaway from ALPA would further fracture and destabilize our profession and play right into the hands of management teams across the industry. Lee and Tim, as you are well aware, I am working in exactly the opposite direction – trying to move pilot unions closer together as evidenced by the fact that APA has recently signed a services agreement with ALPA to help APA negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement.

Finally, I asked Mr. Caplinger to cease misrepresenting my position as part of his recruitment efforts. I stand strongly behind the leadership at ALPA and have been working diligently to forge closer cooperation and coordination between APA and ALPA. To be clear, I will wield my veto power at CAPA to defeat any attempts by the DPA to make any sort of overtures to CAPA.

Sincerely,

Captain Dave Bates
President, APA


The conventional wisdom within our MEC agrees with you. I do not.

Question for you, Alan. If someone had asked you 20 years ago if a 32.5% pay cut in a single contract was "doable", would you have thought it was?


That's a 3 year period out of a total of 10 years. Everything we have accomplished since taking a 32.5% pay cut to prevent bankruptcy and then a 14% pay cut during bankruptcy leaves us at a 34% pay cut in buying power today. All we've recovered is most (not all) of the 14% pay cut we took during bankruptcy with an 1113 gun to our head. The financial crisis that was so dire it compelled over 50% of us to agree to a draconian, unprecedented 32.5% pay cut is long over. Our industry has been restructured in a way that should smooth out to some degree the up and down cycles and facilitate more consistent profits. Our company is making literally multiple billions in profits with an outlook for even better. And our current buying power is BELOW the buying power we had after taking the 32.5% pay cut in an extreme emergency situation.

Me too!


Okay, my analogy had some holes in it. (pardon the pun :))

The point is that these "men and women who have devoted countless hours, days, and years of their lives coming up with strategies to score as many point for us as possible" have predetermined that the number of "points" needed for restoration is not possible. That may be acceptable to you but it's not to me and it's not to thousands of other Delta pilots. I appreciate their hard work and sacrifice. I don't appreciate their defeatist attitude and lack of proper respect for the value of our profession.

I'm not clued in enough about compensation, but I thought about this and wanted to float it here.

The company would love to reduce training costs by having us stay in our seats longer (extending the freezes).

Instead of that, would it make sense to offer an override to our hourly pay that increases every year we are on the same equipment?

For example. I bid 737 CA with about 15 years left at Delta. With the new override, I get an extra (say) $2 and hour over the base rate for each year I stay on. After 15 years that would be an extra $30 an hour.

The company wins because I won't chase dollars by upgrading through the 767, A330, or 777.

I win because I get paid bigger dollars without having to change equipment.

(For the record, I hate going to training).

Thanks Starcheck, good post.

Hey DW....Why is my phone number on your white board?:eek:

Did you ever get to CUN?:D

Carl,

I do not believe that Lee Seeham is an incompetent boob. He advocates for clients who simply do not have the best plan forward for Delta pilots.

Any bargaining agent is an easy target due to the extremely high standard of care they must meet in their representational work.

The criticism I would make of Seeham is that he does little to regulate his clients and perhaps caters to their extremist inclinations. I do not think very many attorneys would have been willing to bring forward the case made on behalf of the USAPA and later the DPA. Frankly USAPA's best defense has been it's ineffectiveness at actually achieving any of it's intended harm.

Instead of that $2.00 override, it ought to be $2.05. Just sayin.