motorboatin

Let’s not confuse “acting like you have a pair” and “rolling over” with plain old good judgement. Some dummy tells you, vote no and the Co will come right back (two months was it) and give an extra $100M and all will be good!!?!? Are you out of your efffing mind? Nice try yo, but that’s not gonna happen. You’ll be lucky to get back to the table within four months and effectively starting from a halfway point. Anyone that thinks the Co is going to come in and offer a bunch of cash with no enhancements on their side has been sniffing too much glue. You want an extra $100M? Adios drop/swap, adios premium pay, adios vaca at 5hrs, AND you’re still going to have PBS and you’ll make an extra $10/hour. The list goes on and on. It’s called bargaining, not demand and receive. You’ll waste at least a year trying to lengthen your proverbial dix meanwhile a year of retirement has gone, you’ll continue to earn $100/hr less than your peers, your lost income will NEVER be recaptured and oh yeah, that extra 10bux a year from now is almost where you’d have been if this current AIP was ratified. Truth hurts, friends.

TooMuchTime

15+ years and I'm not voting yes for a Spirit contract. ALPA National doesn't have the balls to push for $265 if this gets voted down, but I think $255 wouldn't take more than 3 months to renegotiate. That gives Spirit a ladder step for their next time around instead of an anchor.

CantStayAway

You act like these things are the be all end all. No premium pay above 82? See ya! Don’t care. Vacation days at an industry standard 4 hours? Fine, as long as we’re at an industry standard pay rate.

Our drop/swap language is important today, but I’m not even sure how it’s going to work with PBS. Unless there’s also language requiring the company to keep a certain percentage of each base on reserve then they can just staff real lean and that flexibility is gone anyway.

An extra $10/hr 1 year from now is not worth a no vote, but you don’t know that’s all it would be. I expect it would be more close to jetBlue rates next time around.

You are right that 2 months won’t happen though. Likely we’d recall the MEC, have to wait for the election to finish, then have a new NC appointed, get them up to speed, and then start negotiating. Probably at least 10 months before something else comes along.

Regardless, I personally will not sell myself short because I am too impatient. If the rest of the group sells me out life will go on and I’ll still be ok.

Xdashdriver

Industry average is more like 3.5 hours. And no thanks, 5 hours stays to shore up the value of our vacations.

The exact same way it does now. All that PBS does is build you a line. 4% of known flying will be held back and put into open time for us to use.

There’s nothing stopping the company from doing this right now. In fact there’s more incentive to do it with line bidding than PBS.

CantStayAway

So you’re willing to work all 12 months of the year for below industry AVERAGE pay in order to have a slightly better vacation month 2-4 times a year? I’m not.

What type of flying do you think will be left over? 8 hour day trips? 28 hour 4-days that start on Monday? Nope. It’ll all be garbage that no one wants anyway. Think 4 day trips with red eyes worth 16 hours credit.


Maybe so. There’s just so much of this deal that falls short though. We’re giving up a huge concession to the company by giving line bidding. They are not paying what they should for that concession in my opinion.

PulledBreaker

So wait, he's a dummy because he said the company will deal in two months. But you turn around and say it'll take a year, and we will lose this and that? You are not only fear mongering, you are full of bs.

Xdashdriver

If it's only slightly better then dropping to 4 hours a day probably won't help much in getting us to industry average pay.


I don't know how they will work the open time pot in this regard. I suspect you're right in that they will award pairings until 4% of block hours remains and then cut it off. That means the less desirable trips will be left over, kinda like DOT now. PBS does favor seniority more than line bidding. Junior lines will be slightly worse and there will be a greater number of senior pilots getting what they want. Apparently the language regarding union involvement in the pairing construction process is still being finalized, but I'm hoping there's some good language in there that will put us in a position to modify some of the worst pairings to make them more palatable.


If by using the word concession you mean that it negatively impacts our pay or quality of life, I don't think there's a large negative impact. Vacation value is negatively impacted, even at 5 hr days, but other than that I'm not seeing a big downside to it right now. If one comes to light in the full language then that will give more cause for more concern. If by concession you mean that the company achieves some significant cost savings, then yes, that's true.

I agree wholeheartedly that the company is not paying what it should (especially years 2-11). While we do have leverage in regards to them wanting to IPO, and fill pilot classes, I really don't think the company would have painted themselves into such a corner that they are super desperate. It's simply advantageous for them right now to get a deal done with the pilots so they decided to negotiate.

On the flip side, they also have leverage. It's our current contract. Now that an AIP is on the table one of the big questions becomes "can we break even on a better contract given the time it takes to renegotiate?" The break even point is likely well above $10/hr more, as you noted. The big question for me is the likelihood of achieving the kinds of gains we need to at least break even without having to give up anything more on the work rules side.

They knew this going into negotiations a couple of weeks ago and likely priced their proposals accordingly. It is very frustrating, and I share in the anger that is being expressed here by several that the contract falls short of expectations. The last thing I want to do, however, is to give the company a win by failing to achieve a break-even do-over 6-12 months from now.

Need a real job

You do realize that at this point the company needs this more than most of us.(some already have the bonus spent because they are incompetent when it comes to financial decisions and that’s where spineless yes voters emerge from.) when the company needs something, they can make things happen overnight. They have to be forced to do it and that’s what a No vote would do. But it’ll be interesting to see how many fellow pilots have a backbone and demand better. We’ll see.

Wheelswatch

Xdashdriver, where did you get the 4% open time number from? Is it solid?

If PBS doesn't really hurt us in any substantial way (just builds our lines, etc.) and we get to go about our normal F9 way of altering everything we do to our liking, why in the world would they want it so badly?

I assert, most of our current flexibility is inherent to the inefficiencies our current system produces. The pilots are kind of like the final solution to cleaning up all the loose ends in the scheduling, which yes, costs the company money, but provides a measurable QOL factor that wouldn't be there otherwise.

PBS will suck all the inefficiencies out. If it didn't, they wouldn't want it. No matter how you slice it, we lose something, and something rather big IMO with PBS. So yeah, why not some better rates with it, if we have to swallow this pill?

Just as a quick aside: I already guarantee you based on older conversations I've had with reps, we're going to lose aggressive rsv outside window specific, sick day buy back, and trip splitting.

Wheelswatch

If we lose trip splitting, it's a catastrophe. This will directly impact how we do QOL here, PBS notwithstanding.