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Originally Posted by tsquare
Nope. I want more money. I have been clear about that. I want health care. I don't give a damn about RJs. And I don't give a damn about feel good mission statements and goal statements. It's too early for that. It's meaningless except to placate you and Jerry. Get the troops fired up now, and they'll burn out. Guaranteed.
That's weak, T. Really weak. I'm assuming throughout your life that you've had some pretty impressive achievements. Maybe athletics, maybe military, maybe academics, etc. Just about anyone who gets to be a pilot at this level (major airline) has. None of us accomplished our goals without defining them and then setting a plan in motion to achieve them. I know you know better than that. You just don't want to admit it because it counters your argument.
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Originally Posted by tsquare
"Restoration" will not happen in one fell swoop. It's ridiculous to believe that it will.
Nobody is saying that. It's a straw man you like to use to discredit those with whom you disagree.
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Originally Posted by tsquare
You want 34% or something like that. It would be great, but it is not remotely reasonable (standing by for the expectations management crap). It is reality. We are not going to get a contract that will deliver that kind of pay increase before somebody else closes the gap.
A 34% pay cut requires a 51% pay increase to get back to square one. I "want" 51%. I would accept 34% because my expectations have been lowered and because, given the almost impossible situation we've been put into by DALPA going for 10 years acting like we accept bankruptcy as a reset, I'm not sure 51% is doable anymore. I don't even know for sure if 34% is. That's how bad of a hole we have dug for ourselves. I do know for sure that 34% is not doable if we give up from the start and don't even try. (There's that pesky objective again.)
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Originally Posted by tsquare
It is not only bad business (for Delta) it is stupid.
That's been the conventional wisdom. It's definitely DALPA's position. But I don't think it really flies. We are some of the higher paid employees at this company. And there are a lot of us (~12,000?). So our cost to Delta adds up to a big, impressive number. But in the grand scheme of things, as impressive of a number as that is, it's relatively small. At the end of last year, I added up my total cost (including profit sharing, company 401k contributions, etc.) and divided by the number of passengers I estimate I carried. My cost was $2.98 per passenger. A 50% increase to that would be $1.49... about the cost of a large soft drink at McDonald's. Based on that (and the fact that there is more than just me up there), let's say the average cost per passenger for a 50% pay increase for us would be $3.50. (I'm attempting to account for the fact that bigger equipment pays more and international flights have more pilots.) The airlines invented $25 bag fees out of thin air and have no problem collecting them. You don't think they could find a way to net an additional $3.50 per passenger (through increased revenue, decreasing costs in another area, or some combination of both)??
Of course, if they aren't faced with the prospect of having to do that, then they certainly aren't going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. That's where effective, appropriate representation that's not afraid to advocate for what's right comes into play.
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Originally Posted by tsquare
And then there's TVM. PD wants to wait. He ignores the magic of compounding. He will throw you and me under the bus. (and himself also, but he can't do math, so he doesn't realize it) You are a smart guy when it comes to investing, and it totally surprises me that you seem willing to discount it also, but apparently the victory of punching management is more valuable to you. Reasonableness is what will get us our money. How to define that is the crux of the problem.
Another straw man there. You always like to come back to this "punching management" idea. There's a difference in being appropriately assertive and standing up for yourself versus wanting to just punch someone because you don't like them or feel they've done you wrong. The idea of restoration is not vindictive. It has nothing to do with that... no matter how much you try to make it seem so. It's just business.
And nobody (certainly not me) is discounting the time value of money. How about the time value of 10 years of draconian pay cuts and loss of significant benefits like the pension? Now there's some serious time value of money!
Time value of money is one of the big reasons why we need to set a high bar with our objective and begin pursuing it aggressively.
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Originally Posted by tsquare
But a 34% pay increase on day is not "reasonable" by any rational definition, I do not care how much the company is making.
Neither was a 32.5% pay CUT on day one, followed by another 14% cut about a year later. I don't care how much the company was losing at the time, that was over the top... completely unreasonable.
The point is that you cannot restore an "unreasonable" cut with a "reasonable" increase. The math just doesn't work that way and you know it. Again, either you are FOR significantly increasing our pay (like you say you are) or you are not. You can't have it both ways.
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Originally Posted by tsquare
And you know that I am right on that.
No, I don't.
And even I am tired of this discussion. I'm never going to change your mind and you're never going to change mine. Hopefully, some of the lurkers and the less partisan folks reading here have benefited one way or the other from this discussion.