The only thing I expect from profit sharing is to be able to super size my fries. Hope we learned our lesson on that one!

True. Better to take half or two thirds of the percentage in annual hard dollar increases that roll up and can't be taken away. If you still want a small percentage of it as lagniappe, fine. But hard dollars compound and put you in a better position for the next CBA.

Profit sharing???

What company do you work for??

At Atlas there is no more profit sharing to speak of.

Hope it works for you wherever you work.

At Atlas, our profit sharing agreement was a wonderful victory.

For the company.

For the pilot group, it is an insult.

8

Profit sharing is never worth what you have given up to get it, like an overall increase to your hourly rate. As soon as you get a legitimate increase to your hourly, or other substantial QOL increase, the profit sharing vanishes.

Likely excuses include...."Your contribution to the company profit no longer represents what was considered prior".

I got my call the day after, but that was over 3 years ago.

I have a couple of friends who have been waiting over a month; dont worry. Only one round of interviews recently so expect a call when they pick back up after the holidays.

You need to reread the post. I'm guessing you weren't around when the original deal was agreed to. Profit sharing used to be really good, with a bunch of guys getting over $20,000.00...some even more.

The PROBLEM is that profit sharing is a VARIABLE...and too many people expect it to be more than it is.

That's why it's better to take the percentages in profit sharing and make them hard dollars in the contract. That way there is no variable, just hard dollars. Looking back to when it exceeded 15%, it would have been much better to have negotiated two annual hard 5% increases with a 5% profit sharing variable than hoping for 15% to last forever. That way you get 10% each year of the CBA that never goes away. And your baseline for the next CBA goes up substantially, giving you a higher baseline to negotiate from.

And back in the day Atlas used to share the profit among 500 pilots instead of 1000. And back in the day gas was cheap, and planes were cheap, and we smoked cigars in the cockpit, and we loaded the cargo ourselves, and we flew open cockpit planes, in the snow, with headwinds, on both legs, sitting on a wooden crate full of coffee beans.

In the 21st century, almost every pilot group has gone to a defined contribution plan consisting of AT LEAST a 15% company contribution - with no employee match required - into a 401k account in the employee's name. Once the money is in the account, the company can not touch it. The employee then chooses the portfolio plan best suited to his or her needs. No other retirement plan comes close to the retirement security this type of plan offers. (And, no defined benefit plan is secure whether it is administered by the company, teamsters, or anybody else. Just ask a retired Delta pilot how the DB plan worked for them.)

Atlas profits will vary significantly (as you have seen) and will never be what they were "back in the day". The company can manipulate the numbers deftly, costs are higher, margins are thinner, and our contract has shaved our profit sharing plan to nothing short of a joke. So, you are correct, profit sharing is VARIABLE. So why do you insist on linking any sort of retirement plan to profits? Smarter guys than us have had this figured out for a while now, and it is a waste of our time and resources to try to reinvent this wheel.

I repeat, you will NEVER see profit sharing checks like you used to "back in the day".

+1.. we need to stop worrying about profit sharing; that's not the battle we need to chose to fight, it's that industry standard 15% match you mentioned and the other goodies we deserve that we need to focus on.

You win free beers for life.

Every single one of us should print this out and put it in every airplane.

Great post.