Section 6 negotiations
 

Has SWAPA served SWA with formal notice to open section 6 negotiations? There are conflicting reports out there. Some say yes and negotiations are ongoing. Others say SWAPA has declined to enter section 6 and is working only on a side letter for international and back side of the clock flying. What is the actual story?

No one from SW knows if your in negotiations?

I believe they opened negotiations in March. 6 months early.

Most section 6 negotiations open 270 days before the amendable date. Any idea of how they are going? Will they get it done by August?

SWAPA's CBA has a 60 day clause. In an earlier side letter, it allowed Section 6 six months prior. It will not be done by this August. At the earliest, I would say next year.

Question to SW pilots: The word on the AT side of the partition is that they company will be coming after some of the "goodies" in your CBA (sick accrual rate, premium open time, etc).

First, is this true and second, what's the concensus on your side about all this? It's one thing for the company to want this, but is the pilot group really going to sign off on a concessionary contract?

The company will bargain for every dollar they can save in this contract, as always. The real question is what will the pilot group be willing to give up. My thought is this group is not willing to give away anything that hard battles were fought to gain in years past. I don't think a concessionary contract would ever pass membership ratification, but anything is possible.

The latest battle was fought over side letters 12 and 14. The membership was quite vocal that they were not willing to sign off on a near international and ETOPS side letter without tackling the red eye and average daily guarantee questions that were obviously going to arise from this type of flying. The company realized that SL 12 was going down in flames and that would definitely jeopardize their plans to ramp up that flying as soon as regulatory hurdles were taken care of. SWAPA and the company came back to the table and drafted SL 14 to address these issues in the event that SL 12 was ratified. SL 14 offers a 15% premium for all red eye flying and more importantly defined ADG as per calendar day. So, if a red eye is added to the end of the pairing ADG will carry over and pay 6.5 for the last day. SL 12 passed and 14 is currently being voted on. Of course there is more to both of these SL's, but these are the highlights. We surely didn't get everything we wanted and I'm sure the company didn't either, but we did secure some foundational issues that were needed.

Thanks for the update Shoe. You were smart to get that stuff clarified and settled before starting to do the flying. Redeyes are the pits, but almost all airlines do them. SWA discovered the advantages to Redeyes when they looked at AirTran's books, so they are the thing of the future. Hopefully, SWA will take all of AT's redeyes sooner than later.

I would hope there is no talk whatsoever of a concessionary contract. Who ever heard of a pilot group (or any union) accepting less pay or giving up work rules when the company is making a profit? Don't let GK bully you like he did us poor AT pilots! He shoved the B Scale and DOH -3 down our throats, not to mention the pay cut we have all taken. When SWA bought AT they told us (in a nice glossy brochure sent to our homes) that it was all about the money and the culture. Well GK destroyed the culture with the SLI and gave us a pay cut on 1 Jan. It would be a shame if we crossed the fence just to find lower pay rates on top of everything else that has happened.

Stand strong SWAPA. Don't let management bully you.

Not all of your redeyes. In Side letter 14:

"Multi-leg red eye duty periods constructed in the Planning process will not normally have ground time between flight segments that exceed two (2) hours, and in no case will ground time be scheduled for more than two hours and thirty minutes (2:30). (This provision satisfies the restriction on Continuous Duty Overnights.)"

Maybe it's the labels that are confusing, but you do know there is a difference between a redeye and a CDO. A redeye is a flight usually from the west coast to a destination east of the Mississippi which arrives around sunrise. Your duty period usually starts after 2200L. On the other hand, a CDO (also called a stand up) can be between any 2 points, but has an intervening short stay in a hotel, 5-7 hours, which doesn't reset the duty clock as it keeps running (hence the "continuous" part of CDO). Usually a redeye is one leg. CDO's are usually round trips between city pairs (for AT it's ATL-XXX-ATL) during the same duty period.

In any case, I hope SWA takes the redeyes and SL14 prohibits CDO's (I personally don't think they are safe, so I avoid them at all costs).