Thanks for "managing" the expectations of your fellow pilots...😞

Let's use your logic. If you vote no, you are "holding out for a 30% pay raise and quality of life improvements across the board"/ If you vote yes, you are logically and realistically setting your expectations.

If you think the company won't call our bluff on this TA, you're kidding yourself. November 1 will come and pass and we either won't see TA2 or TA2 will be full with the shifting of chairs on the titanic which is what Quigley explicitly stated in his memo to the pilots.

In my opinion, we would have been better off to start the SPSC going and start the picketing campaign that we aren't on management's side. This MEC and NC are the typical Charlie Brown/Lucy situation. At the end of this, we will be doin all the things we "have" to do in order to get a good contract.

We tried to skip the management vs pilot part and the results were predictable. When SWA has a more militant attitude towards management than United, you gotta question what bizzarro world we are living in. SWA guys were allowed to leave for months on end with pay and go away for a year or 2 and now they are back demanding raises.

Kirby isn't our friend just because he is a grad from USAFA, where a good portion of our fellow pilots graduated. If seen enough self serving graduates than I'd like to admit. If we never exert leverage, we will never get the contract we want or deserve.

A massive TA No vote would have been leverage. A huge drop in the stock price when this happened would have been leverage. We gave away that leverage for a promise that the company won't act the way it has 99/100 times in the past.

I have lost all confidence in this MEC/NC. If we don't recall them now, the only hope we have is for a real NC/MEC to pass a new TA within the next 2 months that will force their hand.

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First of all, of course people have different reasons for voting YES or NO, I don’t pretend to understand each individuals’ motives. But if you’re spring-loaded to vote NO unless you feel you’ve stuck it to the company, I think you will be disappointed. This management team doesn’t work like that. It is far simpler

I can guarantee you SK had an upper limit he’s already prepared to spend. Our goal is to get as close to that as we can. If we ask for something that is above that number, he will send his negotiators back to reshuffle the cards and put the money where the pilots (think/say) they want it.

The reason this won’t become adversarial, is because he isn’t that type of negotiator. His style is to play the union as the buffer and let us argue amongst ourselves. There is obviously enough frustration in the world that we won’t stay focused on the company as our “adversary,” we’ll find a way to bicker amongst ourselves. Bottom line, he doesn’t need us to be happy, although I think he would like that, he just needs us to not be mad at the company directly

You guys think you’re negotiating against a spineless suit like Smisek… and your proposed tactics are about as sophisticated as he was.

You could have laughed your first post off as a joke, but I guess it’s double down day!

I love fadec’s satyrical posts, but that isn’t really my style.

You didn’t used to be so tightly-wound awax. This TA stuff has you sounding like one of the alter-ego profiles (alleta, mytime, etc).

What his upper limit is and what actually gets spent are 2 different things. How much beyond that limit depends on how unified we are. I’ve said it before, it’s gonna be expensive, it’s gonna **** off shareholders, and it’s gonna require “baking a bigger pie”. Management doesn’t simply get to dictate the value of the contract. We will extract more value, either nicely, or through the legal process ending in withholding of services if he wants to play hardball. And he can KMA with his United Next plan. Not one pilot should be doing any of the garbage espoused in PPD until a contract is settled to our satisfaction.

There is no legal recourse for a carrier of our size, especially given the grants we received. We can file, get in to mediation, etc, but we will not be allowed to strike. Many of you are fighting battles from the past

The truth is the same as it ever was... Our only true, unilateral power is to cause harm - legally or otherwise. The non-legal and gray areas are fraught with legal risk to the union, pilot group,and individual pilots. The legal route is years away. All the big talking and flexing is toothless blather.

I love it when people who have zero say in the matter pontificate about we’ll never be allowed to do this or that. Face it, you have no clue what will happen. You’re just parroting nonsense you’ve heard elsewhere.

Like most propaganda, this post is mostly false, based largely on myth, and engineered to provoke an emotional reaction - in this case one of powerlessness.and resignation.

I’d challenge “Chowdah” to lay out the facts, not the urban legends and half-truths, behind why anyone should believe what he/she has claimed here.

And btw, much of labor’s leverage lies in being able to pose the credible threat of legal self help. That leverage precedes entering into self help. Labor’s leverage does not suddenly begin when it enters into self help. That’s an important distinction.

You got me, I’m not a lawyer posing as a pilot ;-) I’m simply another line pilot with my opinion/guess about what the presidential board would say (which is convened if the NMB, after years of steps, finds that a legal work actions would “threaten[s] substantially to interrupt interstate commerce to a degree such as to deprive any section of the country essential transportation service.”

My conjecture is based on the fact that no airline of our size have ever successfully struck in the US. And the optics for either the “pro-business” side or the “pro-consumer” side would sympathize with our “inability to make meaningful progress, beyond the status quo,” when our starting employees make six figures and we have 4 year employees making a base salary of ~220K.

By the time it gets to a presidential board, it becomes about optics and who is going to risk the fallout from a strike? I absolutely could be wrong, but so could you and I think the odds are definitely in my favor.

At the end of the day, labor contracts are settled because the company needs some minimal level of cooperation from the employees if they want to provide a half-decent product, not because of the threat of strike. Again, welcome to 2022, where the “legacy” airlines are giant and very much in bed with the government.