You can debate the affordable care act without reading all 1000+ pages of it. There is enough in the AIP bullet points to debate. Not enough to decide how to vote. The TA will bring a whole new amount of discussion and debate. Nice to get some of the highlights out of the way first as a starting point/basis.

 

First let me address the whole false accusation that I'm looking for revenge and perfection. I seek revenge on no one because (1) I don't believe in it, (2) no one has hurt me. This is my "retirement" job - I do this for fun. The pinnacle of my career was in the past (as far as aviation is concerned). Moving people from A to B is hardly comparable. However, I'm still a warrior and I will always be. I see lots of screwed over people and otherwise underpaid/overworked people at BJ and this bothers me on a moral and ethical standpoint; I also see a bunch of self-made victims. Since I do not fear being broke or homeless, I can afford to care about others. You may view it as revenge/perfection but that's only because I'm more aggressive towards a realistic goal, and not one I'm told to accept. I keep saying that BJ pilots are defeatists because their frame of reference is almost universally based on their RJ days or "it's better than what we had before" without realistic, empirical study of the competition, or even better, what is actually possible. Yes, my goalis perfection, but a goal is just that, a goal. Anything less is simply terms of surrender, which I unfortunately expect of BJ defeatists. BJ pilots KNOW how to be conquered! Just look at 3x ALPA on property and 3A. The blue juice is so deeply embedded in BJ pilots that they don't even know it - Stockholm Syndrome. I don't surrender.. I'm a warrior. I always will be. Sorry if you are not. It's funny how compared to my more militant SWA and DL friends, I'm quite moderate :-)



You’re telling me the basic philosophy of negotiation is give and take. OK… but it also depends on where you are starting from. Otherwise you are playing into the relativistic argument that BJ *wants* you to give into. Why are you convincing yourself of what our best offer can be? Are you negotiating with yourself or with BJ? Did they say NO you can't have those rates and those rules? No.... you are already walking in with neutered expectations, exactly like BJ wants you to. Do you go to war only telling your troops you can only realistically defeat 60% of the enemy? No... you tell them you will defeat them all and have overwhelming victory.



Now, Consider the simple metric of BJ’s profit(not revenue, which doesn’t include overhead cost). This is a great document because it doesn’t force you to know their specific costs. BJ is pulling in:
· 290% of AA
· 207% of UA
· 153% of DL
· 131% of SWA



With these PROFIT margins (note: not revenue), why can AA, UA, DL, and SWA afford to pay their pilots significantly higher WITH profit sharing & rules that are far superior? Answer: they choose to because their pilot unions didn’t settle for less(except may AA whose union sold them out with compromise).

And that's not even considering the millions/billions BJ is saving with the Trump Tax Cuts.

Rather than investing in you, BJ has chosen to burn money on BJ technology ventures (on Bonni and her amazing lack of tech knowledge), hotels, airplanes in cash, and now their travel business.
You say that it’s naïve and idiotic, yet you have no objective frame of reference from which to base your statements on, except that “it’s better than before”. You have to admit that you are caging your argument on the personal intuition that we are akin to Alaska and almost to SWA based on fleet size or some other comparable metric.
Negotiation is not just give and take. It’s also being able to walk away if the deal does not meet basic requirements. If you merely compromise, you’re always going to settle for less. That’s why so many people here are OK with “better than before”. Did BJ walk away from buying VX or did they figure out their base level requirements were not met? Sure, there are some minor points of negotiation, but you must have requirements below which you can go no lower. Personally, and talking purely of wages, I want no lower than (SWA+DL+UA+AA)/4, but also with work rules that meet or exceed their standards.
My final point: even if the contractual language is acceptable to you, we will never truly have reached our profit potential because we never maximized the negotiation process. This could only be achieved through extended strike.BJ will offer something that is directly proportional to what we accept as a minimum. That’s why they toss crumbs at us… they only pay what they have to. If we don’t strike, we will not have given BJ the maximum incentive to provide us professional/market leading rates/rules that BJ is *capable* of. Given they make so much profit, surely their ability to pay us and provide good rules is superior to any of the legacy carriers. We will never know if we settle for less now.
Even the best work rules will not compensate for the additional time required to achieve rates comparable to the top 4 air carriers. In other words, our goal should be to make the most amount of profit for the least amount of time investment. The work rules will probably rigged to reward people who do 100 hrs/month routinely (e.g. the juicers). I say this because BJ calculates all of this… their playbook is based on numbers. That’s why we’re understaffed/underpaid now, yet the juicers make a fortune but FOs are on food stamps Year 1. BJ want to control productivity. One of my Delta friends always brags that Delta pilots are the most unproductive in the industry. In a sense, this too should be our goal. I don’t want a situation where we are only getting DL/UA/AA rates by sacrificing QOL.The NYC guys don’t care because they live there and it’s easy for them to get to work. However, it screws over commuters. BJ wants to pay you 200% because they save a lot of money by understaffing and paying a lower basic rate. Again, this is why the juicers/non-lanyard wearers are the juicers/non-lanyard wearers. This system works for THEM but not for anyone else.



The market is at the best time in history. Airlines are making record profits. If we accept what the AIP implies, it will be 4,5,6,7+ years after this contract before a new one takes effect, and the AIP bullet points did not mention a "snap up clause". You will lose millions $$$. We need to maximize now. There is no guarantee that in 3-4 yrs the market will be the same, particularly if some socialist takes office.





This communique is for entertainment purposes only. It does not implicitly or explicitly acknowledge employment with any air carrier nor is any relationship implied. This communique does not represent the opinions or policies of ALPA or JB ALPA and does not represent the collective pilot group, ALPA, nor does it imply collective bargaining, advocacy, or workforce actions intended to disrupt operations.

 

HB, I read the bullet points, and even those are unacceptable. I'll read the contract too, as a lawyer. However, I have extremely serious doubts the legalese will improve it.


This communique is for entertainment purposes only. It does not implicitly or explicitly acknowledge employment with any air carrier nor is any relationship implied. This communique does not represent the opinions or policies of ALPA or JB ALPA and does not represent the collective pilot group, ALPA, nor does it imply collective bargaining, advocacy, or workforce actions intended to disrupt operations.

 

What is a living wage? I know this a leftist/social justice warrior/MSNBC talking buzz-phrase but it's never actually defined anywhere except for as a term of attack for virtue signaling.




This communique is for entertainment purposes only. It does not implicitly or explicitly acknowledge employment with any air carrier nor is any relationship implied. This communique does not represent the opinions or policies of ALPA or JB ALPA and does not represent the collective pilot group, ALPA, nor does it imply collective bargaining, advocacy, or workforce actions intended to disrupt operations.

 

If I want a good burger I'd go to a good restaurant but if im going to Burger King I'm getting a dollar menu burger. Not a 5 dollar menu burger with a so called living wage. I don't care at all if someone can't apply themselves and move on to a better job. It's an entry level job and should be paid entry level wages. To pay for your gas money to take a girl on a date (high school job). It's a joke when someone says you should raise a family of 4 being a burger flipper.

 

I agree. Here is my issue. They took surveys and polling which is both subjective and objective (wilson polling) I don't think they just ignored it at all. I think they took it all into account. PTO is sold back at time and half by less than 25 percent of the pilot group. I do but apparently many others don't. I am not a majority either is the 25 %.

I need to read it all. Cause I don't know what it says. Sure we can chat about it. I just don't have enough knowledge to look at the total package and state a case about how i feel........yet.

 

I've noticed this too.



By the way, I think PTO should be renamed. PTO implies that you can take a day off that you of your choosing without regard to company constraints. As far as I've noticed, you can only PTO if there's sufficient reserve coverage to drop the trip during the initial bids or if you can drop it in later iterations. Therefore, why not just always drop a trip UTO and then sell back PTO at 1.5x? Maybe it should be called Paid Dropped Tripped Option PDTO or something similar. In a former life, PTO was whenever I wanted, not just at employer convenience.



Also, Delta now requires Doctor's notes for extended sick outs (or something like that).



This communique is for entertainment purposes only. It does not implicitly or explicitly acknowledge employment with any air carrier nor is any relationship implied. This communique does not represent the opinions or policies of ALPA or JB ALPA and does not represent the collective pilot group, ALPA, nor does it imply collective bargaining, advocacy, or workforce actions intended to disrupt operations.

 

We are domestic codesharing in less than 20 days with a narrow body (A321) provider.

If narrow body domestic is scoped in but RJs are scoped out that is industry leading?

How many E190s equal a single A321LR in a ASM growth metric?

Also how many pilots attrit from Jetblue each year.

Is the plan as long as we don't furlough (read attrition) and grow ASMs (E190 to A321 LR while shrinking fleet numbers) we can domestically code share with a narrow body provider?

Anyone seen that fleet plan that was approved by the BOD a week or so ago?

 

It’s a domestic code share on paper yes. But it’s an ETOPS route. When we get certified for ETOPS I’d expect us to take back that route. Or maybe there’s a carve out for Hawaii but not CONUS. We’ll know in a few weeks when the full language comes out.

Full disclosure, I learned all of that on bluepilots. A website that has somehow become more civil than this one. Never thought I’d see the day.

 

Who are we code sharing with?