No trouble with my medical, but I do like being home almost every night and having 20 days a month and every weekend off…

 

She said that Deltas offer was within the zone of reasonableness. If we walked away, nothing previously agreed to would be binding. And she would not be scheduling anything except a status meeting for months. And since Delta had come to the table and negotiated so well already over the past couple years, yeah it could have drug on for a long long time.

Not making excuses, just throwing out what happened.

 

Was there anything preventing DALPA and Delta from getting together without the mediator to hammer some things out if DALPA declined the offer? No, there was not. Rushing to accept it with less than 24 hours to think it through was not smart on DALPA's part.

 

Except the company had no reason to come back. That’s the key part you are missing.

 

How exactly are you estimating 20% PS for next year? Based on what? I read the forward guidance and my estimation is about half of what you state. Just to be sure, are you confusing income and profit?

 

When DALPA’s full ask was published we were not in mediation. The company however immediately filed for mediation upon receiving our full contract proposal in Dec of 2019. Before any meaningful negotiations under the mediation process started covid hit and talks were suspended. You can compare key areas of our TA to our ask and decide how the mediator drove the process.
Vacation currently 126 hours maxed out. Our ask was 260 hours plus. We achieved 156 hours give or take a few hours.
Retirement was a 16% DC. Our ask was a 25% DC plus a supplementary plan giving each pilot a 300,000 minimum cash balance at retirement. We achieved a 18% DC phased in over 3 years.
Our pay ask was 20,8,8 for a 3 year contract. We got 4, 4, 14 non compounding bonus for those 3 years. We wrote into our union bylaws that full retro had to be in any TA and then accepted a 760 million signing bonus apportioned by the union in the 4,4,14 mentioned above. It was specifically done this way to cut retired pilots out of most of the bonus. We abandoned retro pay. To put the numbers into dollars we got 140 million, 140 million, 480 million. A modest 8,4,4 raise schedule would have paid about 270 million, 410 million, 550 million for a total of 1.2 billion plus. Full retro on our ask would have been in excess of 3 billion.
We asked for full control of rotation construction, we got nothing.
We asked that vacation weeks be spread equally throughout the year. We got a couple extra summer weeks from the current pitiful allocation.
You can go on and on with our ask verses result.

 

 

For any UA guys, Sailing has some keen insights from time to time, but...

Our (DALPA's) original ask was big, along with company profits which exceeded $6B for several consecutive years before negotiations started. Considering all the losses we all endured through bankruptcy and mergers, ours was not an unreasonable ask.

Though our vacation hours did not go up dramatically, our pay did. By about 35%. We now lead the industry in pay for vacation. And that has a big impact on the bid months with vacation now. Important distinction.

The (divisive) $300,000 Minimum Balance for near-retiree's was never going to happen, especially after Covid-induced early-outs. Never. That demographic shift drove retirement to the bottom of the priorities in new polling. The "stolen" pensions is a big argument at DAL.

Also, IMO it's not reasonable to look back at Covid, and honestly expect "full retro" of our original ask 3 years on, especially when no passenger carrier has ever gotten it beyond 1 year post-amendable. Comparing our original ask to what we ended up with, considering all that happened through Covid is absolutely absurd. Sailing has a point about our retro being disappointing. It is, but its also disingenuous to compare our original ask with what we got as if we somehow folded. A lot of *** happened, and it's waaaay more complicated than that.

Our Vacation in the summer is actually going up above what is in the rest of the year. Every week went from a minimum of 1% to 1.3%, and the summer months have a 3-part formula that demands more weeks than any other time.

I could go on and on, but take Sailing's pontifications with a grain of salt. While things absolutely could have been better, especially in a few select areas, the vast majority is actually pretty happy with the new deal.

Best of luck to my UA brothers and sisters. I genuinely hope y'all knock it out of the park. Stay unified!

 

stockholm syndrome

 

Nice, but no. We all value different things. I value my time off far more than anything else.