accepting anything less than full retro is a major concession. It sets an unbelievably bad precedent for all future negotiations. The whole point of retro pay is to encourage management to not drag their feet. Without retro there is zero incentive for management to negotiate a deal.

At this point I'm fine if this drags out for years to get it right.

Ditto!

Not sure the good will of the pilots will last that long. The motivation to keep this operation humming along will fade. Once it does, a new TA may help, but the memories of the lack of good faith on management will stick around for decades.

How else would you make whole the ever increasing pilots retiring? Especially those that said no to more money in the short period of time they have left.

This is how it should be done. The fact that full retro is not standard is amazing to me.

Any good will or penchant for cooperative engagement is a faded memory for me. And it won't be returning for a long time if at all.

So let's do some cocktail napkin math. In public. If we negotiate a contract that will take effect on Jan 1 2017 with a 20% pay increase. Too low, I know. But if that is the case, do you honestly believe that management will write a check for an additional 20% over what we made in 2016? What do you think is their limit on this? I have no idea, but as time goes on that number will be getting smaller and smaller. So I think it depends on how much they are willing to pay us going forward but adding in the retro pay dilutes that amount. So now we have retro pay in addition to the huge profit sharing check we are gonna get for the next couple of years. I'll hang up and listen. Should be interesting.

Realistically the company is not going to go along with full retro pay if this ends up taking more than another 60-90 days. It's just too much for them to swallow. Go out there and find me a pilot contract with full retro pay signed in the past 10 years off of a contract that was amendable for 1+ years.

What your NC should focus on is getting a quality TA that doesn't sacrifice scope or quality of life for a little extra $$$ and one that includes yearly raises beyond the next amendable date so that the next time negotiations come up you'll keep getting yearly raises. Something like a yearly COLA+1% should do the trick.

They don't seem to have any problem writing those kind of checks to themselves or the shareholders.

JM stated last week at the C44 meeting, we are asking for "full retro". Stalling will just mean a bigger retro check to write. Write your rep, tell them. If they hear it loud and clear, the negotiators will get the message.