Alaska Airlines Receives Arbitrator's Decision
Saturday April 30, 10:08 pm ET

SEATTLE, April 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- An arbitrator notified Alaska Airlines today of his decisions on the major terms of a new contract between the airline and its Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) bargaining unit.

The decisions of the arbitrator, Richard Kasher, cover all 1,465 pilots employed by Alaska Airlines. The new contract becomes effective May 1.

The existing contract between the airline and the union called for an arbitrator, mutually agreed upon, to resolve differences if the parties were unable to reach agreement. ALPA and Alaska Airlines began contract talks in October 2003. The arbitrator was called in to help craft a settlement when an agreement could not be reached by a December 15, 2004, deadline.

While wage provisions go into effect tomorrow, full implementation of all provisions is expected to occur over several weeks. The contract becomes amendable in two years.

The terms of the agreement, set by the arbitrator, were based on information presented by both the airline and ALPA. They include an approximate 26 percent reduction in pilot wages, various work rule changes resulting in productivity improvements and higher employee health care contributions. No changes were made to the pilots' pension or profit sharing plans.

"We are grateful to the arbitrator for helping us reach a resolution," said Dennis Hamel, Alaska's vice president of employee services. "This allows us to move forward with a competitive wage and benefit package for our pilots and helps us achieve a better cost alignment with other major carriers."

Alaska Airlines, the nation's ninth largest carrier, serves more than 50 cities in Alaska, the Lower 48, Canada and Mexico.

It's worse than that in some cases. 3rd step FO's take a 34.3% cut Twelve year captains take a 21.9% cut. The new contract is amendable May 2007. Of course everything is negotiable but with a victory like this, I doubt the company will be interested in negotiating in good faith. I expect we will still be negotiating in 2009. Alaska is going to be a very ugly place to work for the next 4-5 years.

Can you post the new rates? They're not up on APC yet.

There's up now: www.airlinepilotcentral.com/content/view/45/17/

Notice the source of this release: it's a PR Newswire press release FROM Alaska Airlines. If I were Alaska Managemnt I'd try to downplay this raping of the pilot group too.

Consider that every pilot at Alaska is taking more than a 26% pay cut from hourly wages, cash payout to the B-Fund has also decreased as a result of the cuts. It's still 3%, but the cash payout is now less as a result of the hourly rate cuts. Also, th yet to be announced medical co-pay dollar ammounts will provide additional relief to Alaska. Then monitize the loss of vacation override, which IMO is HUGE, and you have much more than a 26% hit to the Alaska pilots.

It sucks that Alaska pilots are joing the ranks of UAL, USA, DAL, AMR, etc. in taking pay cuts to foster inept management and to subsidize cheap tickets for the public.

I understand lots of sick calls yesterday. I'd be ill too if I had those cuts rammed down my throat.

The arbitrator involved screwed us on a simple, slamdunk (or so we thought) matter. Evidently his style is to act as a mediator before he makes his ruling and rule in favor of whoever shows more of a willingness to work things out. It would be interesting to have someone at Alaska tell us how much they were willing to compromise.

Ill sum it up. We have recieved profit sharing checks the last TWO years. We've also had a binding arbitration side letter for the last 30 years that more or less mandated that we negotiate until a set date then if not TA reached we pick 5 rule items each and wages all go to an arbitrator. The side letter has changed over the years but we have always been more or less compared to the other majors (read average of). Through two seperate rounds our MEC offered up 35 million in concessions in early 2004 and 65 friggin million in concessions in Dec and our company shrugged their noses. They refused to negotiate in good faith from last April on.

On top of that we get some dipwad arbitrator named Richard Kascher (dont ever use him for anything) who was so lazy he picked the companies wage proposal which was in his own owrds "draconian". He didnt even rule on 3 of the things he was suppose to all of which would have benefited the pilots.

So now as a result our airline is in shambles, not to mention 13 days later they laid off 600 rampers in our biggest hub in SEA and outsourced them to a bunch of non-english incompetants. Weve had numerous misloaded aircraft and near serious damage done to airplanes. Of course management denies all this saying it is going fine.

As Duane Woerth said once, "Managements get the unions they deserve" and for the first time in a long time around here they are getting a taste of it.

This is a profitable company overall and they are just greedy. In the big scheme of things, we still have our retirement (they tried to freeze it too) and our jobs. Alaska's A plan is the best funded right now in the industry (approx 93% funded). Our ERISA attorney said that in all likelyhood it is over 100% now due to the severity of the paycuts they just got.

Think twice before applying to work around here.

Wish I could get out......