phalanxo

You should see what PBS just did to everybody at compass in February. You guys have no idea what kind of concession you're taking for free. Absolutely no idea if you vote it in. PBS disregards seniority in order to award better pairings to the people junior to you when it benefits the company (which is always.) There's no protection they can put in that fixes the fundamental problems of PBS. It can't go in seniority order because it's all pieces of a puzzle and it'd be left with nothing but end pieces. You get whatever makes the puzzle fit whether it's what you wanted or not and seniority doesn't go out the window entirely but that is the last priority as far as PBS is concerned.

N19906

Yep, record profits.
The best year ever for Horizon and Alaska Air Group.

phalanxo

A lot of dodged questions about the q400 and what will happen if the contract doesn't pass with the E175s. Typical.

squall line

Just curious...who is your PBS vendor? Do you have contract language for minimum staffing levels for PBS to function properly?

snackysmores

They will do whatever is most profitable in the short term, because all they care about is their overvalued stock price at this moment. They know if they give the flying away it will cost them millions as we burn the place down, so I think they would go back to the table. Especially if its 51% No and 49% yes.

LineGrinder400

This non-passing speculation will all soon be a moot point when this company fishing expedition, concession laden TA sadly passes 60/40.
Their many lifers buying into the fear of unknown factor and enough impressionable junior guys buying into "commit to compete" will serve this nice concessionary gift to a company that just announced a BILLION (not million) dollar profit.

I hope I am proven wrong and gladly eat crow but willing to bet that I am right.

Phteven

$1.35B if you include the stock buyback, but whose counting...

I'm with you. I am not optimistic about this thing getting voted down even though there are a myriad of reasons why it should be. Too much fear, not enough logic and risk tolerance.

phalanxo

Our vendor is AOS. Same one Skywest uses and I've seen my buddies schedules there, same nonsense. Essentially our contract says PBS should leave very little open time, they can't raise the floor above 85 and there has to be a 10 hour range at least so they can't give everybody 95 hour schedules... at least somebody has to get awarded 85. It's pretty weak. But I'm sure no matter how "ironclad" your contract language is, they'll find a loophole to do what they want. And they certainly will construct trips with the contract in mind to get what they want. It is absolutely a big concession and worth getting some serious money for, not giving up for free.
Basically if this thing passes I don't even understand the point of being represented by a union. Pilots are asked to share in the company losses, they should also share in the gains instead of being used as pawns.

lowflying

Are you saying the minimum line AOS will build is 85? If so that is nuts...

phalanxo

It's configurable within the software, and for us nothing in the contract prevents them from raising it to 85. At least the past 6 months it's usually been a floor of 85, so that is our minimum. Not sure if you have protection in your TA but it doesn't matter anyway, because there is a hard floor (what they set) but also internally within the software it starts assigning higher and higher line values as it realizes it's not going to cover every pairing and then starts doing weird, sometimes seniority violating stuff to make sure absolutely everything gets covered. If it didn't, it would have a bunch of pairings left that it couldn't use to make legal schedules. Your day off bid doesn't matter to the system, if it needs to it will disregard that bid and call it "company need" day and award you a company need pairing.