Let me ask you this:

Why should we force the company to fly 717s to certain locations when a 96 seat RJ flown by a lower-paid pilot would be smarter from a business standpoint?

It will also increase profits if we all take a pay cut.

I know this sounds flippant, but I'm not trying to be rude to you. I get your line of reasoning. Here is the deal. The company can reduce as much flying as they want to any theater they want if they are not in a JV. But because we are in a JV, where as pilots we have agreed to share some flying out of our scope because we set limits to what can be flown and how much and by whom, the company has limits on the flying. This protects us from having all of our international flying outsourced to a lower bidder.

If the flying is not profitable, it should not be hard to convince the JV partners from reducing their flying. Or, the company can end the JV. There is nothing preventing the company from purchasing more planes and meeting their JV obligations (CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS TO US) and benefiting from the profitable flying in other theaters.

The 650,000 hours is a baseline of hours that matches our flying a few years ago. Since then, we have added thousands of pilots to our company. That means, if we stick to the same number of hours of international WB flying, we are actually shrinking our WB flying almost every day a new class starts. Has our NB flying grown?

SCOPE is important. The company entered into an agreement with us. We have every right to demand it live up to its end of the deal. If we desire to let the company out of that deal, I will not be agreeing to it for an industry-standard pay rate. The company can unwind the JV to free up its international options or it can adhere to its commitments to us.

These are our jobs, upgrades, pay raises, QOL being given away out from under us.

 

We have recorded all of these outstanding questions all of you have posed. We expect to be hearing more from the NC and SME's shortly with amplifying information on this.

The MEC is meeting in DC currently as many of you know. As the meeting wraps up we expect more information about critical sections to be made available to the pilots. As soon as we have that information we will forward it on.

Thank you.

Delta MEC Communications Committee Volunteers

 

Jobs are lost and gained based on economics. If the company can make money, they'll put a plane up.

Currently, I don't think anything changes if the TA is ratified. We would excuse an existing amount of non-compliance.

The reason you have these contracts is to protect against large swings, upside or downside. Our partners generally have larger aircraft. If we grow, you want your protection in EASK's (seats): they add a 380, we add 2 767's. If the economy tanks, and the JV pulls flying back, you want it pulled in some fair proportion, but not EASK's (you don't want to dump 2 767's for a AF A380).

At first glance, we have decent protections up/down traded for being slightly lower than our allotment now. We're not coughing up jobs from here, but we could have been higher, in theory. Or, to be in compliance, we could have leaned on our partners to cut more of their jobs/flights, and been in compliance.

If you are forecasting tremendous growth on the Atlantic, we're saying we'll capture a little less (but still add pilots). If you're forecasting mediocre-to-down on the Atlantic, the TA adds a block-hour floor. That's about it.

 

Sounds reasonable to me not sure why this is such a sticking point.

 

If that were the case we could (and should!) "sell" them our entire wide body scope language. All of it. Just get rid of it, and the B-School geniuses will rock out with their profits out and we will all be lifted by the rising tide. Right?

No.

They have shown an incredibly hostile propensity to use foreign metal by every plane, crew and seat they possibly can...and then they exceeded that...and merely threw some money at us when they violated it for YEARS. Every agreement gives us less than half. Why? Why does every single JV give us less than half or whatever metric they are forced to measure it by? Why can't we at least do half, or a couple percent more? Why do we always have to do less than half? Why? Always.

No one thinks they can force the company to fly wide bodies into losing routes just to give us jobs, etc. They are free to pull down whatever makes sense for them to pull down. The point of our scope is to insure that we get our fair share instead of some foreign pilot group. DL is the dominant network/revenue generator/ticket seller in pretty much all of these JV's. Yet our managers would like more and more and even more of the profitable lift that they identify and go after to be flown with foreign labor.

Our scope is the ONLY thing stopping that. DAL wouldn't exist today without DALPA PWA/CBA pilot scope. Our Section 1 is the only reason DAL as we know it currently exists. Otherwise it would be a virtual network clearing house broker.

 

I have no idea how you went from what I said in my post, to what you say in your post, Gloopy.

But to address yours: of course, the deal needs to be fair. 50/50 sounds fair for one side of the Atlantic against the other. EASK's is fair too. It's awesome on the upside, terrible on the downside. So we traded compliance for a combined % and block hour floor, with slightly lower %. If you think we're facing a downturn (I tend to), it's something to weigh, but nothing to have a coronary over.

Right now, I tend to view Scope as neutral in this TA, but I reserve judgment. Ironically, history might tell us the mistake was not improving the ratios on the NB side. We have protections on the JV, and globally, but are we exposed on the NB end?

 

I don't think its 100% safe to completely rely on either EASK's or Block Hours. There are scenarios where we could get screwed with either, even if we did get half. We need both in a way that fairly captures our share.

But at least we should get half. And last I checked, half is half, not some BS "flex" number, the bottom of which becomes the new ceiling in perpetuity.

I like the concept of ESK and BH, JV and global, in theory. The real question is are the percentages enough? I don't think they are. The BH floor is (correct me if I'm wrong) significantly less than we're currently doing, and we're also essentially forgiving their current refusal to honor our half of the EASK's even if you define half as the lower limit of the fake "flex" amount.

All of that is a loss and there's really no other way to spin it. It doesn't appear to be a huge loss, but why are we losing anything in the most unreal negotiating environment and relative industry economic times in the history of the world?

That said, I really do like the 3 year measure/1 year cure being replaced by a hard 2 year period. I suppose in theory that might partially make up for it, because you can't just look at the percentages in current book without also realizing that there is no floor for 3 years balanced only by finally giving us our agreed upon share for one year, and then down again for 3. That is insane and we shouldn't use any lawyer who green lighted that language ever again. So that part is definitely an improvement.

 

Stop giving them viable jets, the ratios won't matter. You view not giving away more 76 seat rj's as a mistake???

 

The reason the company wants lower limits on JV production balance is because that is where they intend to go...lower, not higher. Think about that. And when it comes to JVs in our contract, past performance is a very good indicator of future returns. Managment WILL go below whatever floor is established without penalty and we're proposing that we let them do it by writing the language into the contract. Bad precedent for future contracts everywhere.

 

I do.

I don't.