Dunning-Kruger on full display here.

No one said “can’t have it” to you It’s not an “accounting method”, Growth companies reinvest profits back into the company and service debt Yes, and they also stopped paying a dividend many years ago and haven’t since. This is not uncommon for a small company to pay a dividend to shareholders and then change strategy to use profits to drive further expansion instead. The checks you got years ago are irrelevant to the current profit sharing discussion. No you’ve only proven a limited understanding of finance, and that to recover what you already gave away to any significant gain would require revenue sharing instead of profit sharing, and what you want is to try to leverage away NK work rules you don’t care about to get.

-Not every pilot has to drop to zero every month to benefit from DTZ.
-It’s not something that is used by only a few pilots of high seniority.
-DTZ encourages a more open time trading as they are not hamstrung by some arbitrary minimum credit target.
-You have pockets full of straw man arguments.
-I am not trading away work rules for money, particularly bonus money that is predicated on the same “incompetent management” to do a really good job running the company for us to get.
-If you want your profit sharing back that YOU gave away, that’s cool, trade something else from the blue side, or don’t trade anything.

 

You're so cute.

JB pilots NEVER gave away profit sharing. The company took it, unilaterally, before our first CBA could be finalized. Nothing we could do about it.

How are the checks we got years ago, which were from the profits of the company, not dividends, not relevant? We were a growth company then (even more so) and we are a growth company now. So you guys can stop trying to tell us a properly written plan won't pay out since we're a growth company, we've already seen that it does pay out.

You can have your list of priorities, I have mine. You fill out your surveys, I'll fill out mine. The MECs, NCs and pilot surveys, and pilot votes will drive this process. While something being industry standard or normally found in peer CBA's isn't everything, it is something. Profit sharing is in every peer (in our peer set) CBA/company policy, including our current one. Pure ZERO TDZ is only found at NK. While I have no problem keeping it, I'm not sure I like the odds. But maybe. I do think it's highly unlikely we see a JCBA without profit sharing plan improvements. I'm sorry that triggers you.

 

Um excuse me? If you are gonna engage on a hot button topic you should at the very least be mildly educated on it. WE did not give it away or trade it for anything! It was taken from us pre CBA.

 

As a data point, my previous regional also had DTZ. I regularly dropped my reserve and picked up in and out of base since I was a commuter. It’s not just an NK thing. How we go about DTZ is unique to NK, but DTZ is not totally foreign amongst other carriers

 

I think a spirited debate can really help to expand everyone’s knowledge base to enable optimum input to the MEC and NC for the upcoming JCBA. And not everyone is GOING TO AGREE, because commuters have different things that affect them than people who live in base do, people with young kids have different needs than those without, people with spouses who have great family insurance plans or a spouses career geographically fixed jobs…, we’ll, you get the drift.

Eventually we are going to have to all compromise - suboptimizing what we each would really individually like because of the the needs of our fellow pilots. But that educational process isn’t going to work as well if we get into personal attacks and name calling nor does it help the negotiations if management believes we are fractured and divided as a pilot group.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as opinionated as anyone, but let’s keep it cordial if we can and be ready once we are done to all come together and push for the best deal we can get. JCBAs give the unions involved a lot more advantage than a CBA that the company is just as happy to let drag out for months or years. Let’s give everybody’s ideas a fair hearing and in the end come together in union for the best possible JCBA.

 

I am, thanks. I’m just not the one for you

What do you think dividends are? Profits of the company! Ding ding ding. Companies keep a certain amount of cash on hand, but when a matured company has paid all its bills and has excess profits they will typically do one of three things:

The first two have to do with how companies fund expansion/operations, either debt or equity. So with extra cash they will either 1) pay off debt or 2) buy back stock

Otherwise the owners, the shareholders, will vote to 3) pay out dividends from the excess profits. This is the same pie that the slice of employee profit sharing comes from.

Just because JetBlue paid a dividend, and thus a slice of that as profit sharing, in the past as a smaller growing company doesn’t mean they have the ability to continue to do so. This is not being an apologist for your management. The company has taken on significant debt obligations (and now a few billion more for NK) and has also issued tens of millions of new shares of stock in 2020 to raise capital. The combined market capitalization of both our companies together is still barely a fifth of Delta. This means significant capital requirements will be needed to continue funding growth for the foreseeable future if their intentions are to compete at the legacy level, which makes it very unlikely for a pot of excess cash to be consistently leftover from which to pay dividend or profit sharing, despite their attempts to both grow and pay out in the past.


And fine, you didn’t give it away, it was taken from you. Whatever I don’t care. I am not opposed to profit sharing language, nor am I saying I wouldn’t like a nice check when the day comes that the company is sitting on tons of cash. I am also very pragmatic about the fact that even with “industry standard profit sharing language” it is highly unlikely we would see significant, steady, or equivalent profit sharing checks that our legacy counterparts enjoy. What I am saying is that I would not trade away lifestyle parts of the contract that are tangible and useful now in order to obtain that language. That’s my stance.

 

That seems to be a majority opinion of the Spirit pilot group, but not the JetBlue pilot group. It is worth remembering though who is buying whom, and which pilot group is bigger....

 

It’s equally worth remembering why your company needed to buy us in the first place.

I’m happy to debate CBA stuff because I have no animus towards B6 pilots, but there’s nothing to be gained from sowing division between the groups with a “who should deferential to whom” attitude.

 

I appreciate the more civil tone.

I want to correct your basic assumption though. Our contract required they set aside (one iteration of the plan, it changed a few times) 15% of the reported profit into a pool to be distributed. This wasn't a, if there was any left over situation. They had to set aside 15% of profits. Obviously if it was a tough year, no profits. But if it was a normal year, they set aside 15% of the profits, because that was the plan requirement.

When companies are unlikely to have high margins for a period of time is EXACTLY when you try and achieve these profit sharing plan improvements. If you wait until the company is forecast to be highly profitable, management is that much more resistant to the plan, as it will have a cost to them now, vs somewhere in the future. So now is the time to get the plan, and later the rewards will come. Even as a growth company, we had years in the past that paid 10-13% of our salary, if my memory serves me correctly. By the way, JB management has told investors during calls that they anticipate returning to normal margins, and shortly after that much higher margins, in the next few years. I didn't remember the exact quote, but it was shorter than I (most) expected.

Another way to think of this, is if the plan really isn't expected to pay much (by you), then it should come at a relatively low cost in negotiations. So why not get this INDUSTRY STANDARD provision now and let the chips fall where they will at each annual report.

Overall, there is a LOT I want to carry over from the NK contract. So no, I'm not not trying to trade away the NK work rules wholesale. If there's trimming I would consider a scalpel, not a saw. And that's an "if".

 

NK wasn't exactly doing well on its own, let's not forget that. Either way, we make the donuts, we don't own the bakery.