Pay Yardstick
 

Just got longer.
American Airlines CEO tells pilots the carrier is prepared to increase pay to up to $590,000 per year (msn.com)

Not really... read the fine print. Isom is actually drooling over Delta pilots' folding on a historic opportunity and he wants to "lock those gains" for American. That's all it is.

I’ll give the American CEO credit for at least talking about matching DAL. He understands the situation at hand.

Do our (SWA) elders understand, are fully informed, that we may be running into a recruiting and retention problem? It doesn’t appear to be the case. I’m starting to believe they think we still have 10,000 eager applicants that only applied to SWA and wouldn’t dream of applying anywhere else. And, that no current FOs would dare leave for greener pastures. I’m not sensing any urgency in the expensive seats section in Dallas. I hope I’m wrong…

You should talk to some of the guys/gals on the interview team....

Yep. Exactly.

We need to watch out for the same strategy here. Classic management playbook. It's basically what they did to us with TA2 last time. They offered rates with some curb appeal, partial retro in the form of a bonus, and an industry-lagging B-fund. Didn't change a whole lot else. Pilot group and former SWAPA president bought it hook, line, and sinker.

I posted the rest of this on another thread, but worth saying again here:

...if AA gets away with just focusing on matching or slightly bettering DL’s compensation, without meaningfully addressing quality of life issues, retirement, benefits, work rules, and full retro with an interest penalty and B-fund contributions, they’re saving the corporation mountains of cash that, [sarcasm] rightfully, deserves to go to the executives’ bonus funds. [/sarcasm]

Classic management tactic: attempt to win them over with the shock and awe, the curb appeal of some upfront money, but leave most of the guts of the thing under the hood unchanged. The day-to-day experience of flying the line remains just as sh**** as it was before, pilots on disability are still persona non grata, retirement still lags, and no incentive has been created to prevent them from stalling next time.

I don't think they care very much about attrition. I think they may desire attrition. In some ways, it works to their advantage because it keeps a larger proportion of the seniority list at the less expensive longevity steps on the pay table.

Also, younger and more junior pilots tend to have less expensive needs and think less about the future.

They tend to not have families. Not as many of them are thinking about the reality of providing for multiple kids, their sports activities, and their college funds. If they do have kids, their kids are younger and not into the expensive phase yet of child-rearing.

Most of them don't have any ex-spouses yet. And if they do have an ex-spouse (or two), because they were likely young and not "wealthy" when a divorce occurred, it likely wasn't a financially devastating event.

A larger proportion of them are thrilled to just be flying jets at a "major."

And since they are younger, 12-hour days and short overnights are much easier to handle than it is for older, more senior pilots to handle.

Younger pilots tend to have fewer and less expensive medical issues.

It seems to me that SWA could be attempting to drive attrition for some or all of the above reasons.

In that sense, then, I don't know that we are faced with a pilot shortage that gives us any leverage in terms of generating fears of attracting or retaining pilots at SWA.

But, I do think the idea of a pilot shortage provides us with enormous leverage in a way that I don't hear anyone talking about: the ability for the company to hire scabs if we get released from mediation and begin to approach the point when we could legally strike under the RLA. Because there are so many airline pilot jobs out there right now and so many of them pay better than SWA does, I think there are very few pilots out there who would be willing to scab at SWA to make any kind of meaningful difference in the company's ability to break a legal SWA strike. That is a huge amount of leverage because scabs have historically been one of the most effective strike-breaking tools management has had at their disposal. That threat is essentially nullified right now.

You might be surprised about the younger generation. A majority of the the younger guys I know are financially intelligent and are well aware of potential losses by staying at SW if the next contract doesn’t exceed “market rates,” soft pay, work rules, disability, etc. I know of several guys that are speaking with their feet and many will continue to do so until upper management pulls their head out of the sand and delivers on a contract that has the rest of the industry scrambling to acquire the ever dwindling pilot pool. I don’t math but the equation is simple. Be the best + pay the best = most applicants/best applicants. I couldn’t agree with more in terms of leverage against the company come a potential scab scenario and I’d like to think SWAPA is also well aware of this play. When things do come to the table, I hope we don’t make the same mistake as Delta and settle for what we think is “best we can do.”

If I quit before a contract, do I forfeit retro?

Didn't last time...

As of yesterday, 100 pilots have left SWA since Dec 2021.

If that was 100 pilots since Dec 2022, then maybe, you might have a point.

But, we’ve only lost 100 pilots in 14+ months. That’s 1%. That’s hardly a mass exodus. That’s hardly evidence to the company that new hires are being driven away by the pay or quality of life at SWA.

The fact is very few younger guys (or any guys) are voting with their feet at the moment. I wish they were because then that could be leverage for us. But they aren’t. If they leave, as you say, after the contract is ratified because it didn’t exceed their expectations, that’s too late to be used as leverage for this contract.

Right now, the evidence shows that pilots, for the most part, are stayIng. New hire classes are, at least for now, being filled.

The leverage of posing the credible threat of a legal strike is orders of magnitude more powerful leverage than whatever leverage is created by the trickle of attrition or new hire class-shuffling occurring right now.

Getting this pilot group focused on walking the path toward creating the real possibility of a legal strike at SWA is the most effective way to achieve industry leading everything.