Pay Cuts?
 

Im bored. Anyones have a number in their head on a limit of a paycut if the company asks? Just looking thru United threads and they seem pretty bitter about the previous payouts after 9/11. I find it hard to believe that unpaid 50hr lines is the end of all of this.

$0.00

/thread

Zero dollars and zero cents.

Max pay to the last day.

Are you serious? Management will never waste a good crisis. They use these kinds of events to take stuff away from the CBA, including pay. Then it takes years to get them back. This isn’t the first crisis in aviation history, but that is the standard play right out of the playbook.

If they are going to furlough and/or go through a bankruptcy, they will first ask for pay cuts to appear like they are doing everything possible to stave it off. Then they’ll do it anyway. Make the bankruptcy courts throw our contract/pay our. We don’t voluntarily do that. Us taking a pay cut will NOT save this or any other company. But management sure will want you to think so in order to shed some labor costs.

Full pay til the last day.

Without ANY doubt, 0.0%.

The hundreds of millions of dollars of stock buybacks the last several years were primarily to juice executive compensation from stock grant values.

This money should have been saved for a rainy day, and a global pandemic has ALWAYS been a KNOWN potential. They write books about it, they make movies about it... It's happened on smaller scales before, and a larger more severe contagion was ALWAYS possible, in fact inevitable at some point.

On top of that, the airline has had several years of great financial performance, yet none of those extra profits were shared with the Bluemembers during the good years. They were kept by the company and given out to tech ventures, executive bonuses and stock buybacks.

It took 3+ years of no raises to negotiate a pilot CBA, while they put together a $4+ billion dollar package to buy Virgin America in weeks. No delays in management bonuses...

Voluntary 50 hour no-fly lines? Fine. Everyone at 70 hour min guarantee? Fine.

Concessions? Sorry, No.

The government will provide guaranteed no(low)-interest loans to airlines, they can pay the contract they agreed to, and withheld from pilots for years to save themselves money.

The airlines have spent 96% of their Free Cash Flow in recent years on stock buybacks. JB specifically, and recently, mortgaged previously paid off aircraft to raise $500 million, to buy back stock!

If they don't have the cash to weather this storm, I know who's decisions led to that reality, and it wasn't JB pilots.

But, as I said, the airline will have access very soon to no(low)-interest government loans to maintain liquidity for payroll and expenses. The virus will work it's way through the country and the economy will recover, albeit most likely in a recession, but we've all been through several recessions before.

It's going to be hard, but survivable.

$0.00

filler

Should be fairly obvious to us all that anything given up in the short term (despite how hard and tough it will be for many of us financially) will take YEARS to recoup (again) and that biting the bullet to hold on to what we have earned over the last decade is the right play. 9/11 taught airline works groups that bitter lesson.

But we now have to wait and see how this plays out. Hopefully we start to see a course correction on the spread of the virus after a couple weeks and we can avoid drastic measures that will have long term impact. If it continues to climb and stretch into the summer, some hard truths/choices will have to be made by all.

As James and Jstyle allude to, and I will add, we've seen how pilots give concessions when things look tough, and when the airlines recover and recover well, it takes YEARS to get those concessions back.

Gone in days, YEARS to get back, even when airlines make a lot of money for years, the money doesn't come back to the pilots.

Yet incredibly, management compensation recovers very quickly.

I’ve seen this play before and got suckered, big time.

Never again.

ZERO from me.