Yep. I think it is against this forum's policy to out anyone by name, so a picture with a name would be even more excessive.

It kinda reminds me of the deck of card that we use to hunt down terrorists. At the end of the day, we are all Delta Pilots. Play nice

 

Agreed. Lets stick to thought and ideas and leave the names and pictures out.

Scoop

 

I don't have much patience for for the politics or the personalities. For a little perspective though, the people that negotiated TA12 had me making almost 40% more than my buds at UAL in the same seat and same longevity at the time of signing. They brought us a rushed and seriously flawed TA15 and paid the price but DALPA has basically set the bar with virtually no help to date. Let's hope the new guys can do as well or better in a reasonable time frame.

 

They couldn't possibly do worse. How hard is it to get a meager pay raise from a ton of concessions? What management wouldn't want their pilots to sign a contract that was worse than the one they had previously?

 

I agree. TA15 should never have made it out of the negotiating room. I was referring to C2012 which I still think was a good contract for the conditions and relative to the rest of the industry at the time.

 

So, back in TA2012 we could be competitive by paying (at least some of our pilots) 40% more than one of our biggest competitors but now we can't afford to be paid more than a percent or two above. It's all so confusing.

 

It is, isn't it...

Carl

 

Management griping about "higher labor costs" than their competitors conveniently neglects a critical variable: pattern bargaining.

Malone needs to tell RA not to worry about higher pilot costs. They will be evened out shortly.

 

Exactly. So many people in both labor and management seem to think that we operate in a vacuum and that OUR pilot costs are not going to also soon be our competitors pilot costs. In my opinion at the end of the day we are negotiating with our customers indirectly - management is just an intermediary.

I think the senior execs likely do understand this principle but like anyone else they go for the low hanging fruit first. It's a lot easier for them to cut labor costs (i.e. let 600 people go just before the holiday season when you're making how many billions per year?!) than it is to pass increased costs on to your customer.

In Delta's case however, they wouldn't even have to pass the costs on to the customers and we would still have operating margins greater than those of our biggest competitors.

IF the company was investing it's profits in GROWTH instead of "returning value" to shareholders then I think a case could be made for keeping labor costs at a bankruptcy % of revenue level on the premise that the laborers would eventually benefit from the increased size of the future company.

 

That is mostly true. However you neglect to mention that your buds at UAL were making that much less than you because they were recently emerging from bankruptcy. UAL was in it far longer than us. So you were comparing a carrier with bankruptcy wages and we had emerged after having been devastated by that process. We were merely ahead on the timeline. On the other hand we had begun to create a positive trajectory. Hopefully we will continue and increase that trajectory.