Tom a Hawk

Went to the road show yesterday and it confirmed a lot of what I understand about this TA from my reading. This agreement will give me less ability to take time off from this job every year and be detrimental to my bidding every month. There is very little monetary gain in it for me and a lot for other parts of the pilot group to offset the loss of time off and flexibility. My 3 reasons:

Removal of 75% of OE pairing need by the company from the FO bid pack every month. I know many people think that there are just a few FOs buddy bidding check airmen and either double dipping or getting paid to do nothing all month. That has not been the case in my experience. I was able to get a multi day CKA trip bought at least every other month from about 45% seniority in base and seat on up. this has amounted to 60-100 hours per year for the last several years. This was without aggressively bidding with every single CKA. it was just adding that to the bottom of my bid. That's a significant amount of time off or ability to increase credit for a large group of FO's, not a handful. Setting aside the idea of getting a trip bought, my main issue with removing the pairings is that I wont get to bid on the full bid package. If Joe Blow CKA decides he wants to do the 4 day with a 30 hour layover at my blue city, I now miss out on getting to bid a great trip for me. Every month the captain bids will close and crew services will have to go and manually pull out the pairings they want to remove. They'll then send out and email with the removed pairings and every single FO that has anything more than a generic bid will have to go in and check their bid and/or update it manually. I believe this will happen within 48-24 hours of bid closing, leaning toward the latter in busy months.

The $50million signing bonus is not retro pay. It is not compensation for a 12 year captain's perceived "injustices". Signing bonuses in contracts in all industries are there as an incentive to sign a contract that is less than stellar long term. An up front infusion of cash appeals to human nature and gets them on board. So this bonus is an incentive to vote yes. It should have been distributed evenly. To pay a 12yr pilot more than 10 times what a 1 year pilot gets to vote yes is asinine. The council has de-incentivized the bottom half of this seniority list to vote yes while over compensating the top 1/3 who are topped out. The disparity is simply too much.

The PTO system is far less flexible and worth less than what we have today. I'm not going to address premium sellback because I didn't use it. I use my PTO for time off. A 6 year pilot currently accrues 126 hours of PTO a year. If they take 2 weeks of vacation, 49 hours is debited from their account leaving 77 hours left over for sick/PTO/sellback/more vacation. Under the proposed system that same pilot would be REQUIRED to take two weeks of vacation and only have 72 hours left over for the aforementioned uses. 5 hours less. At the same time, that pilot may no longer call in sick unpaid down to the minimum. If they are ever sick, or have a family emergency they MUST burn PTO. There wont be much left over to use for any other purpose. The NC claim that you'll be able to use that 72 hour PTO bank to bid additional vacation if you want. This is untrue for the vast majority of pilots. The company only has to allot the VPTO bank for all the pilots, and because its required for everyone to take it, there simply wont be any significant number of extra weeks left for anyone to pick up. You'll wait and hope for someone to be fired/quit/change bases/die so that you can get another week. They claim all these changes were necessary in order to gain vacation allotment that is second best in the industry. They claim that desirable vacation weeks(Christmas/Thanksgiving/June, July, August) will be available to significantly lower seniority in each seat than before. My math shows that any of those vacation weeks wont fall below the top 25-30% in base/seat. That is not significantly lower than today. It is a bad trade that everyone should get less time off so that a few more still senior pilots can have vacation in a month where they could already bid off a week if they want it.

For these reasons this TA is unacceptable to me.

rightside02

Makes much sense to me from what I gathered reading what buddies have sent to me .

I hope the best for you guys. My personal opinion which means zero is also to vote it down. I feel there are def some great things in it however some fairly decent takeaways.

It’s def a gamble to vote it down as in when will the next opportunity rise..??

That being said , I know the pilot group well, I feel it will pass

Best of luck fellas

Tom a Hawk

There ARE great things in it. In fact, I love almost all the other sections.

Bozo the pilot

Did the NC/MEC members who were presenting address these issues?
Id like to hear their response.

Std Deviation

Agree. The way this is being distributed is akin to restitution for a senior workforce that willing joined a non-union carrier and voted down a union twice. The union is the impetus for this contract. Divide it equally or reference it to the seniority relative to when ALPA came on property.

queue

I forgot... are the non-members getting the bonus too?



I think they will be forced to pay but not be ALPA members?



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Tom a Hawk

Yes and no.

That is where I learned how long it would likely take to get an email from jetblue about ioe trips. They seem to think the monthly bid will be published sooner in the future and that the process for publishing pulled trips would be quick. Their answers did not convince me that it would happen anytime before 48 hrs to FO bid close and I believe it will likely be closer to 24.

For the signing bonus I believe I asked the question clearly as to why they were de-incentivizing the bottom half of the pilot group to vote yes. They glossed over that and mainly addressed that they were trying to do it in a way not to get sued and not to reward those people who might have been working extra during the labor dispute. ie, not basing it on income.

They straight said that the company won’t have to allocate any extra vacation weeks for the pto accrual. Just vpto. Extra weeks would come from “fluff” required by the math to hit the percentage per month requirements and upgrades/transfers/people resigning. I countered asking if that was going to be a small percentage, less than 10%, they didn’t disagree. That’s why I believe the vast majority of pilots won’t be able to get more than their allotted vpto vacation even if they want to. That and loss of UTS is why I believe this pto system is far less valuable to me.

Tom a Hawk

The nonmembers will get the bonus if this is voted in because the case law precedent shows that the union can and will be sued by pilots for not paying them. I’m not a lawyer. But I think the best way to not get sued for distribution of a signing bonus is split it evenly between everyone who is eligible to vote. And personally if you are on property before the end of vote closing I think you deserve a vote. You’ll potentially have to work under this agreement going forward.

That isn’t necessarily the best way to incentivize a yes vote though.

queue

As I've been saying, TA 1.0 mostly benefits people with special situations (e.g. lives in base) and those who are senior enough. It doesn't really distribute the goods to everyone else. The rules, when played out, are cost neutral at best since only a small minority can actually take advantage of them. This is a substandard TA 1.0 and even the B6ALPA guys have to admit it when confronted about it. You will notice they weren't up front about a great number of things as their goal was merely to "sell it" to you.


TA 2.0



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.

Bozo the pilot

Fair enough Tom, and if these issues are no-go items for you, I understand the decision to reject.
Thanks for the response.