this mentality is mind blowing. JB mgmt is not pilot friendly.

 

We can't count on any airline management to be friendly. We will get what we negotiate and defend day after day.

 

Compared to Franke and friends, they are. They charge pilots for a bag of chips.

 

Of course they’re not. Is any airline management pilot friendly? You missed the keyword “more”.

 

Which has nothing to do with the integrity of the pilot contract.

As long as the clause about delaying a flight to obtain proper nourishment is in there, they can keep their 35 cent bag of chips and I’ll go grab lunch in the terminal.

There has not been a single management group that was ever called “pilot friendly” or came to a negotiation saying they were ready to open their check book because you pilots are underpaid.

Make no mistake, F9/B6 or stand alone, even with regional and major and legacy pay rates setting new bars, we will have to fight for every penny and rig and benefit. No path will be substantially easier.

 

Have to disagree with your last paragraph. F9 will have to fight to get to current B6 rates. They both might be just as hard fought but stats heavily favor B6 going farther or getting to the same place easier.

Its really mind blowing that one might think that Frontier with Franke with lower starting pay rates (substantially lower on the bottom end) will be the same amount of effort to get to the same place as B6. I don’t think anyone actually believes that.

 

This.

B6 already fits right in the mix in terms of 320 pay against the legacies. Frontier simply matched ours closely because it was a similar model. The beginning point of negotiations with B6 is undoubtedly higher. Those guys aren't going to take anything less than industry average of the new legacy pay rates that are coming out. That, I would argue is the expectations of both the pilot group and B6 management.

Frontier on the other hand.....well, just take a quick stroll over to their forum and see for yourself the type of toxic management that is controlling their work life. It's a different animal.

 

We are hourly union workers. Blue collar, expendable/easily replaced and vastly over paid when viewed by executives, bureaucrats and esteemed academia. I doubt we will ever get the profession back to pre 2001 levels and pre deregulation is a fairy tale.

There are no pilot friendly management groups out there.

 

If you are thinking in terms of gains from the existing pay scale baseline, you are already losing. The theme has to be how much we are willing to concede from current industry narrow body scales.

If Franke and co don’t want to accept that’s what it costs to pilot a 320, I’m ready to shut it down in the most unprecedented hiring climate of my career. You think the other carriers out there wouldn’t welcome all the pilots mixed up in the deal with open arms to put a coffin nail in the ULCC model?

I am less afraid of F9 c-suite and board than I am of the top 10% seniority list here who have been making 300k the last two decades freaking out and pushing to take a modest upper scale increase because they don’t want to compete with their last FO at a Delta interview.

 

You’re right but you’re kidding yourself if you think the result of negotiating with either management group will end at the same point or in the same timeline. JetBlue clearly wants to be a legacy/southwest contender and have straight up already said publicly that they will have to adjust pilot compensation.

Yes it’s just words and it will be a negotiation but frontier is going to be a flat out stone wall. We just got as much from our own management. Indigo took it to a strike last time with spirit. Indigo has no interest in being a legacy contender. They want to pick off low hanging fruit with low tier pilots. We are going to Australia to literally recruit more low tier pilots. We just hired the flight school liaison from Envoy tasked at getting the new hires in place direct from flight schools. They have orders coming on both sides and I’m sure are content keeping us separate as long as possible even if it means foregoing a few synergies to keep two low tier contracts in place. They only want to keep their cash flow personal piggy bank in place. Nothing more.