Any good news is welcome.

Airline Employee Pay Raise Demands: Not Just Pie in the Sky -- Seeking Alpha

 

Tom,

The only 'good wages' were back in the day! I'm sure most of us would envy your pay back when being an airline pilot was probably a different time & things were a bit 'more civil'. Let's just say, we can only hope things have hit 'bottom', and we have no where to go but up!

Enjoy retirement!
SC

 

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We all made sacrifices in the tough times to see us through. NOBODY liked what we had to do but as we can plainly see, at the time we did what we HAD to do so that later we could do what we need to do, and what we NEED to do NOW is reagin our Proper salaries. We can NEVER recover ALL that we lost. But Guys?? We LIVED to fight another day.
Well,, TODAY'S that DAY!! Instead of now splintering and fussing we need to think as ONE group and assess. What is the BEST plan for all of us?? How do we grapple with the SCOPE Situations and What do we do to eliminate the Whipsaw effect. I am No longer a Pilot, but I work with pilots As MY PRIMARY customer. So what affects THEM will affect ME. Either directly or indirectly. I need MY pilots to be on the SHARP if their geting PAID keeps them on the SHARP?? Then that's what I'm FOR because it makes what I do a WHOLE lot easier and more pleasant. So there's a SELFISH angle in it for ME as well. I will eventually get mine of that I have no doubt but I put first things FIRST. And, in your future Strategies you MIGHT want to look at the Past strategies that got us into this mess and see if we can NOT go there AGAIN!! Not Everything was management's fault. Some of this we did to ourselves and Senior Pilot Union Officials should try and see if they can come up with a plan to fix some of this.

 

An airline only has so much control over the expenses that it has.

Fuel--can only buy it at close to the same rate as everyone else.

Rent/Airport Fees--not much negotiating to be done, with the exception of new, limited markets.

Aircraft Lease/acquisition costs--again, in an apples to apples comparison, little variation from one carrier to the other.

The remainder? Employee costs. An expanding, growing employee base keeps the average cost per employee down by adding "new hire" help essentially doing the same thing as top seniority. Without expansion, the costs increase annually.

Unless you threaten things like furloughs, bankruptcy, loss of benefits, etc. The most controllable expense in the airline industry is employee wages.

X

 

They are easiest to steal from employees but Employee wages and benefits play only a small portion of airline overhead expenses. Price of fuel and aircraft acquisition and maintenance costs overshadow anything else. A $1 increase in fuel price cost airlines more than $10 million in fuel cost in one month.

After extracting employee pay and benefit cuts from its employees such as pilots, FAs, A&Ps etc, American Airlines executives gave thelmselves millions of Dollars in executive bonus a few years ago. Other airlines have followed suit.

 

I'm not disputing what airline management has done, but simply illustrating that employee wages range from 20%-40% of the pie...it makes it an easy target because airlines can take direct actions on the employees whereas it is much harder to take direct action on items such as fuel, leases, etc.

When you combine fuel, aircraft acquisition, maintenance TOGETHER, sure, they overshadow employee wages. But as a singular piece of the pie, employee wages are fairly substantial as a percentage of revenue.

X

 

I think some under estimate the difference in fule prices airlines pay. With intelligent hedging we have seen huge differences from different airlines.