You mean jobs where you are paid for your experience and performance? Where your raises and promotions are based on your work and not just what day you started with the company? Where you can leave one job making a certain salary and not have to start completely over when you move jobs? I have worked outside the airlines and in those jobs a union wouldn't make sense.

Unfortunately, in the airline business everything is based on seniority. That is why it is so bad when it is violated here. I'm not preaching for a union. I'm just saying that this industry is one where we need protections. At the very minimum we need the protection of an enforceable contract. Management at SGU has a contract to protect them and I just think we should have the same.

 

How well did that firing for the graffiti work for them? That was a vendetta between a chief and a capt. The capt got a very long paid vacation and his job back. The chief got removed. The rest of the story....

 

No black helicopter spaz. I feel that SAPA pushes the company rhetoric and they only want people in SAPA who will do the same. I honestly feel bad for our SAPA reps because I think they work their butts off but the company keeps them chasing their tail so that real issues never get fixed. How long have we been working on that reserve rewrite?? How many meetings between SAPA and management get cancelled? SGU has no idea how bad things have got and if they do hear anything, they dismiss it as the "vocal minority" Lots of people who had no desire to leave are now sitting on class dates or sitting right seat somewhere else. It is that bad that I am actively working on leaving.

And many will follow you out the door. But don't worry because we are filling our classes. So many little things could be done to slow the bleed but nothing will be done until it is full hemorage. Good luck on the new opportunity.

 

Depends on what sim schedule you bid for.... I started the next day, other start times were staggered two days, four days.... up to like two and a half weeks.

 

I had seven weeks off!

 

Wow! How long ago was this?

 

I am still not sure union make sense. They are a phenomenon of the past - area of early industrialization. There are plenty of business - in fact the majority of free enterprises - that work just fine or better without a union. Look at what unions have done to the manufacturing sector in the US and most recently the automotive industry. It took major bail outs and all the job growth is the the south with Japanese and European manufacturers without a union.

Not being able to switch jobs at the appropriate level and having to start over at the bottom is only related to the seniority system. And that is self-induced as in pilot induced. It is probably not gonna change ever but our own doing.

As for being paid for experience ... That is also a little misleading. People are generally paid for productivity. In many sectors that relates to experience to some extend.

However, we are naturally limited. We fly 50 passengers (or 76 as the case may be). And it doesn't really matter if you have been in your seat for 2 years or 10 years. The productivity is the same.

Productivity goes up as seat count goes up ... and maybe stage length.

 

Free Trade is less of a tested experiment than unions.
Someday a generation will grow up to to reverse that tide.

 

September 2014...

 

My solution to this is eliminate longevity and use a flat payscale. No raise just for hanging around longer. But the upside is the industry/market economy would have little incentive to replace pilot groups just because they've been around for a while.

This would work for majors as well as regionals...too many LCC startups are thriving because they get to pay all of their labor at the bottom of the scale starting out. That's an artificial advantage.

The new scale would be set based on where people currently on that scale sit...ie junior narrowbody might use year 4 scale, senior widebody might be year 12 since almost everybody on the fleet is already 12+ years in.

Longevity could still count for things like increased vacation accrual...a little reward for sticking around but enough to create a big competitive gap with new-hire.

Seniority would still apply for bidding equipment, upgrade, schedules, vacation, etc.

The trick with this is the implementation...anybody who is already above the average would not want to take a paycut so labor would have to force this kind of structural change at a time when the airlines could afford to grandfather senior people on their current hourly rate. Hmmm...now might be a good time for that.