Bless your heart as well.

😘

 

since the TA came out, I've met 2 that openly said they were no voters. Other than that, it's been yes.

 

Thats the most Texas thing ever! 🤣

 

That doesn't necessarily mean that a TA ought to be turned into a contract. Again, I assume you've heard it before, but maybe you're new: 84% of this pilot group voted yes on the last TA that is now our current contract.

Most of the pilot group now views our current contract as full of loopholes and lacking in some key areas. It took about 18 months after ratification for the grumbling to set in as the deficiencies in the contract really started to get old.

Arguably, the single best feature of our current contract - a 15% NEC (which started out as something like 13.2%) - was something that nearly every airline already had. "Bottom feeder" AirTran (how AirTran was thought of by most of the pilot group when the "acquisition" was announced had a B-Fund (NEC equivalent) for more than a decade before we got ours. As such, it was a layup for SWAPA to "achieve" a NEC last cycle but most in the pilot group viewed it as an unbelievable accomplishment on a par with the Spartans' performance at Thermopylaei because legend had it that Herb at some point in the previous century had said he'd never allow one at SWA. The "achievement" of a NEC at SWA was pointed to by nearly every yes voter and several SWAPA officials as a significant reason to vote yes.

There have been many other examples throughout history of the majority being wrong or off-base. It's not limited to SWAPA. So, if your suggesting that because most people are voting yes, that it's necessarily a good contract, that's fallacious. If you're saying the TA is going to pass, I agree with you though I'm voting no. I will not be surprised if the ratification vote exceeds 90% in favor.

 

Personally, I'm not voting no because the company might find a way to get around contractual language. They will. But that's not near the top of my list for voting no. My primary reason that I voted no is because this cycle we were in the best environment for airline pilots in negotiations at least since deregulation. We stopped far short of developing the leverage that we could. As one person I flew with once put it, "Unless you're on day 60 of a PEB, you're leaving money on the table." I'm not going to go into the ins and outs of what that means if you don't already understand the RLA. But suffice it to say that as good as you might think this TA is, we could obtain significantly better in terms of compensation, work rules, benefits, and retirement.

I also personally think the hotel language is weak given the amount of leverage that was available to us. Additionally, the implementation agreement has no real teeth. The solution in terms of imposing any sort of financial or other penalties on the company for failing to meet an implementation "deadline" is a SBOA. We know how those have gone with our current contract.

There's also some silly concessions that probably aren't worth voting no on by themselves alone like the sunsetting of the covid trip pull pay policy and receiving no pay if calling in fatigued during training. But why any concessions in this environment?

 

There is a history of the minority being wrong as well. We can go round and round on this, group think can go wrong, isolated thinking can go wrong. Just because we have done something in the past that turned out to be not great (I wasnt here for the last vote), doesnt automatically mean we are going to be wrong again simply because the numbers look the same (voter turnout etc).
For me at the end of the day, it comes down to the simple question of if I thikn stalling (voting no) will drastically improve anyting over the time it will take to get said improvement, in addition my risk/reward tolerance over that same period. In my eyes, its not worth it both in time lost, risk/reward or potential gains. I could be totally wrong, but I could also be totally right and nobody on this forum knows the right answer.

 

Unfortunately, the history with SWAPA and this pilot group is one of putting forth and voting in problematic contracts.

As I said in another post, the main players in SWAPA today who created the TA are almost entirely the same main players that gave us our current contract. That's not a great history.

In the current cycle, this SWAPA team bungled our leverage from the beginning by waiting far too long to file for mediation despite us in the minority calling for them to do so and explaining the rationale for it long before they actually did. Yet, SWAPA at the time said, as rg16 pointed out, that they "were happy with the pace of negotiations." Now, they've owned up to the error. What other errors have they made that aren't widely recognized at this point?

The point is there is a history with the current team at SWAPA and with this pilot group of making the wrong call.

 

I agree and have said many times that they screwed the pooch by waiting so long to file, we are in agreement on this. The rest, while I see where you are coming from doesnt automatically mean it will repeat. Time will tell on this one I guess.

 

As Mark Twain supposedly said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

And the classic, "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."

"This time it's different!", said the majority of SWAPA pilots over the last 40-50 years.

 

Valid points but still not a for sure. That’s all I am saying.