Is It Industry Leading?
 

On July 7th I said a SWA deal was soon to be had. Their union leader knew how to swing the bat in the best negotiating environment in history.

IMO we will see a TA in September.

It is very disconcerting that [the usual suspects] are out in force across all social media spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. This lets us know management is ready for the end game.

Our pilots are highly educated, highly skilled and extremely professional.

No Delta pilot needs to listen to me or Curly to decide for themselves if a TA is "industry leading in pay, benefits and work rules" as our leader Captain Dickson and other management spokesmen have repeated over and over.

We all need to run the checklist.

Is it industry leading?

JV scope

DCI scope

Retirement

Vacation

Training pay

Reserve

Minimum day

Trip rig

Duty rig

Per diem

Hourly rates

I have asked for a list of the industry leaders on all these items from our leadership. A simple checklist.

I.e.

Retirement FedEx and UPS

Vacation FedEx 6 hours per day

Training pay SWA

Hourly rates UPS

Reserve SWA

Etc.

Delta generates the most profit per pilot by far and we deserve nothing less than Captain Dickson keeping his promise. Anything less is a simple No.

I can speak only for myself. I have never wanted to vote Yes more in my career. This golden opportunity cannot be squandered.

I hope Mr. Bastian chooses wisely. His compensation is up almost 1000% since Chapter 11 and good for him. Bravo.

Long past time for him to invest in the Delta pilots who brought over $10 Billion to the industry leading record profits we enjoy today.

I have 100% faith in my fellow Delta pilots.


__________________
Jerry Fielding

The sad thing is its taking, united, American, allegiant, UPS and Southwests Unions to make significant gains in order to try, and i mean try to set our table. ALPA should be leading this advance not following. At the most profitable airline in the world, this should have been much easier. The lack of progress has been staggeringly disappointing.

How new to this business are you? And I don't mean that in a mean way. This is the first time in YEARS that DAL has actually had someone else to pattern off of. I am guessing by your screen name that you are military. I understand how this is frustrating to you. It takes time to turn an aircraft carrier. Oh. air force. It takes time to find the E-5 with a radio and truck to get fuel. :)

you are correct...about the E-5 I mean. :)

It's interesting that Gerry professes 100% trust in the Delta pilot, but 99% of what he writes instructs them on demands we lust make.

I'll simply be happy to trust the Delta pilots.

The reason everyone else is getting good deals is that the group decisively voted last year.

Three words. DPA Propaganda Minister.

This is irony at its finest. Delta led every airline out of the post 9/11 and bankruptcy era for 3 contracts in a row based on interest based bargaining. The minute this pilot group decided not to pursue that strategy, our lead stopped.

You don't think the Delta pilot group pursued 'interest based bargaining" WRT the first TA? Based on the vote it was too much in the interests of management and not enough in the pilots' interest.

I agree you all led the way since 9/11, but the last TA was simply substandard relative to the circumstances (profitability, pilot shortage, positive pattern, etc.) and thankfully the Delta line pilots said no. IMO you all have made the right call every time for the last twenty years with the possible exception of scope, but to a certain extent Moak was right that the RJ situation would fix itself and that the key threat was international (ME3, Norwegian, etc.). Now you have the United extension, the SWAPA TA, and the UPS deal to help.

DAL management overplayed their hand and they are going to pay for it.

I respectfully disagree. The pilots of Delta (not the previous MEC, the membership) led the industry toward significant advances by holding the line during our early-open negotiations last round. We're now about to pattern after those for whom we were enablers. Progress for ourselves is coming; be patient. Nothing worth having comes easily and the mindset that "this should be easy" is a dangerous one at any bargaining table.

I must be the only one who thinks we will not vote on a TA until late next Spring.

If Jerry has his way, it will be spring of 2020.

Id rather do nothing, let everyone blow past us in pay, QOL and benefits while we sit back, enjoy what work rules still remain and collect PS checks ever Feb. At some point management will need a carrot for those newhires up in NYC flying every day of reserve. Furthermore, they are jammed up with JV/CS unless we change metric and those MRJ's Skywest bought will look great sitting out in Kingman, AZ.

Wind the watch and wait. 800 retirements around the corner and the other carriers are there now.

IMO this will be done in September.

Management needs our concessions.

And the surrender monkeys are out in force.

Furthermore, I am pretty sure our merger TA and C12 did not lead AAL's pre-BK contract, scope, A-fund, B-fund, number of wide bodies, etc. How did that contract look compared to SWA? Fedex? UPS?

Merger:
Continuation of the Alaska debacle that set back our LAX plans at least a decade (2008 to 2016-2018 for the new terminals). Combination of both regional programs into the monster DCI became before they couldn't staff it

C12:
ALV+15 for reserves
Significant increase in 76-seat jets at DCI
Reduction in PS
And thanks to side letters, drastic reduction in the floor of Pacific flying

Other than payrates at CAL and UAL, how exactly did we lead? How come our fresh captains are up in NYC and at UAL they are f-CAL 737 captains at LAX?

I strongly disagree that we led... Maybe in some small areas, but not areas that last one's career.

Right Jerry. right.

I guess I'm more confused than an Amish electrician. I thought "the 12" took over the MEC Special meeting by caucus in order to direct the NC to carry forward outrageous demands for the Aug 26th NMB-directed meeting after our "time out." Or so it seemed after reading Buzz's rather hypocritical letter to his Council. Based on Buzz's and Sam's letters, I would have inferred "the 12" were aligned more closely with Jerry's perspective than Buzz's but yet this post appears. To quote James Bond...Dubya-Tee-Eff?

If "the 12" hijacked the MEC Special Meeting and were directing demands and positions that Buzz and Sam felt would ice us for months, how are we able to sit back down at the dinner table with the company and the NMB?

It is truly "bizzaro world" when Buzz is saying the 12 were unrealistically demanding too much but Jerry is saying the 12 are "surrender monkeys." I really need a bigger bucket of popcorn for this show...

The difference is that Jerry wants the MEC to fail.

I do not believe that is correct. It appears that he does not want them to sell us out, like your bunch tried to last year, but fail, no.

Not my bunch, sport. Jerry has an agenda though. If you don't see it, it is only because you don't want to.

Could somebody please post where SD said that every single part of the contract would be industry leading. I would love to see this. I wish it were true. I think what he said was that we would have it industry-leading contract, not that every section of the contract would be industry-leading. Maybe I'm getting lost in semantics.

The bigger question is will ANY of the sections posted by Jerry at the beginning of this thread be "industry leading"?

Go to DLnet and search "Dickson". You'll find a memo dated May 20th. Also, search "industry leading" and you'll find a statement that says something along the lines of "industry leading in pay, work rules and benefits" under the FAQ section.

Clearly Jerry does not care for Buzz's perspective - I get that. Buzz was part of Donut-yelli's "in crowd." But now the majority ("the 12") are supposedly hard-liners in Buzz's world yet Jerry calls them "surrender monkeys." So, by all this analysis and discussion, it appears we now have a 3rd group.....(1) Buzz's caucus who were "the Moakies"; (2) "the 12" who, by inference from Jerry, are the "surrender monkeys" and unreasonable hardliners according to Buzz; and (3), Jerry's kids.

I guess some people will never be happy - like the old union joke..."Okay, okay.....we have a deal. We only have to work on Wednesdays." "HEY.....Mr. Union Man....is that EVERY Wednesday???" We're doomed.

I think Jerry is referring to everyone that doesn't subscribe to his particular brand of bull excrement as surrender monkeys. Watch his feet.

He farts in the phone booth then points at everybody else.

Found it, thanks. He says that is something that the company wants, to be industry-leading. I'm just not seeing it with their negotiating!

YGBSM! If we voted yes to TA2015 we would be so far behind everyone to be the laughing stock of the industry. Nothing is more demonstrably true. The best thing this group ever did for itself was overwhelmingly vote that down. This, respectfully, is the most inaccurate post I've seen.

Come on moderators........give us a like button! I want to like the above post and many others.

I'm 100% aligned with Captain Dickson. Industry leading pay, work rules and benefits.

The 12 are kicking butt.

The surrender monkeys are the 7 plus James, Sailing, Mantooth, Curly, JP, Hanson, Armando, etc.

Hopefully everybody else sees you for what you are: a divisive dpa shill. Nothing more.

I notice that you haven't provided any data whatsoever to back up your latest claims.


More stink in the phonebooth. I know you did it though.

So you are saying we should have voted in TA15 and we would be industry leading. Hello, I'm earth, have we met?

Phew. In that case, I guess I really don't need to worry about "the surrender monkeys" because "the 12" are solidly in the majority. I was concerned for a bit though that dynamics had changed.

Still...it makes one wonder what the NC put forward on August 26th that caused the NMB to schedule negotiating sessions. Maybe "the 12's" position wasn't as unreasonable as Buzz seemed to imply or maybe it was more aggressive than Buzz et al would have liked but maybe the NMB realizes the trend forming with agreements at AA then UAL then Allegiant then UPS and now LUV.

Either way, forward progress is a good thing. Better to vote down a TA sooner rather than later. And sometimes that is what it takes. The NC can sit in that conference room and jump up and down and tell the company "x" isn't going to float, but sometimes it takes a voted down TA to hit that/those point(s) home. Let's see what happens...if anything....from the next round of negotiations. Let the NC do their job and produce a TA before we start labeling anyone "surrender monkeys."

Revisit this quote in a couple of weeks.

My money's on Jerry.

Yes, yes it is.

All of our money is on Gerry and friends. Has been for a little over a year.

Frankly, they have trounced the previous group, and they have the best environment ever. SWA just dovetailed in, and tightened the market. Shouldn't be hard to get a deal in there with a Delta premium.

The MEC has been negotiating together, all through the AIP's, then they chocked in July, and disintegrated in August. I think September is it.

Oh please, what was the environment when the former group delivered us an underwhelming TA, that was soundly defeated? 12 to 7 saves us from another underwhelming TA.

You're kidding, right?

About what?

About the environment we were in. All we had was AMR going ~7% higher, with no PS.

I'm not saying that the "On-Time, On-Target" TA1 was on target, but the vote was decisive, and it gave other airlines an idea of what not to do. TA was the industry reset. Before TA1, FedEx, UPS, SWA were years into their negotiations, with not much to chow for their efforts. TA1, for all its' flaws, was an expression of the democratic process, and the beauty of that process is that it re-drew the market.

Yeah he has thrown enough spaghetti against the wall that some is bound to stick.

Let's go to Vegas.

Come on 22. Come on 22.

"RA needs a deal, baby"!

Within 48 hours.