This. Absolutely this.

 

I don’t think that the argument is being made that junior people aren’t worth negotiating capital, but that the main emphasis should be made where we will spend the majority of our careers. Reserve rules definitely need significant improvement, but there’s also much more to a contract. Also, not everyone is flying 90 hour lines. Look at the awards. I’m on the 737 and my seniority range is averaging 73-80 hours in all bases. My average is right 77 hours per month and never fly red eyes. It’s not all doom and gloom out there.

 

I’ll grant you guys that I really like the idea of making RSV so good it goes senior. But if the argument is that no one wants to upgrade below 50% because of how bad the lines are, that’s only a 40% solution. Fixing work rules could, of course, improve the QOL of a junior lineholder, but you can’t totally get rid of the reality that when a very senior FO upgrades into a more senior position, there’s always going to be some loss in QOL. (Someone’s still gotta fly the red-eyes; someone’s gotta do the 30 hour DSM layovers in the winter.) The trade off for that has always been money.

Like everyone else, I’m expecting big improvements to RSV & lineholder work rules in this contract. (DAL has already led the way on these, so it should be an easy layup.) Senior RSV, higher daily credit protection- I want all that stuff. And maybe these improvements alone will be enough to get the upgrade train rolling. Maybe.

But why wait & see is what I’m saying? When we have an angle to play, why wouldn’t we play it? Why wouldn’t we tell the company that a little more $$$ in that seat could be the thing that keeps an incident with a 13 month CA & a 13 week FO from becoming a devastating news story? Why wouldn’t we be pitching the idea that in addition to a great contract, this extra investment in leadership could be the way to ensure you’ve got tenured mentors representing the brand in your captain seats rather than a rushed & runaway upgrade factory? And the reason I hear most often is that it wouldn’t “feel fair”. Which, to me, is a silly reason not to push for a contract improvement.

 

I understand how percentages work. That’s why I worded my question in terms of percentages and not pure dollar amount. Obviously 10 percent of $100,000 is more money than 10 percent of $50,000. I understand that a Captain inherently will pay more overall money in dues because he makes more money. I’ll try and further explain my thought process. Let’s say that a Captain has been spending 5% of his paycheck towards representation in ALPA. ALPA negotiates everything for him and as a result he will benefit from whatever gains the union gets. The same can be said for an FO who also spends 5% for such benefits. Now all of a sudden we decide that the captains get a 30% raise while the FOs only get 20%. That means that the captains received a bigger benefit for the same rate of investment. The FO did not receive the same outcome for his investment as the captain. That’s what I’m trying to say. So if the FOs are not going to benefit as much for their investment percentage wise, maybe they should then be paying less of a percentage in dues. It’s the most obvious way of discriminating against and alienating half the pilot group. So while we can talk all day about how doing such a thing might fix the upgrade problem for the company, it would create a problem for half of us and is not representative of the term “unity.” I’m open for critique of my opinion but please understand that I know how percentages work.

 

I get your point about money and the ask. I think you're still missing the point that reserve doesn't go junior if it's done right.

We'll always have some twelve-month pilots who will take the first upgrade and run with it, no matter what the QOL hit is. The company is banking on that with this vacancy.

Better reserve rules don't fix the QOL of junior lines. Instead, they provide an alternative to bidding junior lines. For example, a senior FO might take an upgrade into weekends-off reserve over an upgrade spending every Saturday night in GRR, provided that the weekdays don't involve sitting FSB unused every other day, and provided that reserve line had more or similar days off to the junior line full of those four-day weekend GRR trips with the four-hour sit in ORD or IAH before go-home leg.

If better reserve rules entice more middle-seniority pilots to upgrade, then those pilots will take the bulk of the reserve lines. Bottom-seniority upgrades will end up flying the lines with red-eyes, day sleeps, and winter DSMs, because they won't be senior enough to hold reserve.

 

The overarching point is that being junior needs to be more bearable than it is right now. By definition there will always be reserve and there will always be junior lines. It doesn’t really matter how they stack in relative seniority. They just have to suck less.

In my opinion, the gap between reserve and line holder is just unacceptably wide. It’s a combination of money and QoL. For example not being able to trade on reserve is a major red flag. I doubt that will change in any contract scenario though.

The other issue is that there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the system. Bidding 80% in the past gave you a good shot at a line. With all the staffing shenanigans it has become Russian roulette. The end result? People don’t bid until they are safely in line holder territory - 60% or so…

 

Yes.

Over at DAL my buddies tell me guys get ****ed when they get a line, reserve is desirable
over there. Here it’s a dirty word. Wonder why?

 

Again, where this mindset runs into trouble is that we negotiate things that benefit select portions of our labor group all the time. RSV rule improvements, trip credit protections, int’l override, commuter benefits, check airman/TK pay, to name a few. It’s just too big a tent to cover everyone at the same time. And yet, every time one of these things comes up, someone starts in with, “Well, I don’t want my negotiating capital blah, blah, blah…”

We’ve got to get past this mentality that a benefit is only a benefit if everyone gets it. Otherwise we never fix reserve, we never improve trip quality, we leave the TK guys out to dry. In fact, there’s only one benefit that universally applies to all 15,000 of us & that’s pay; and the one thing we all seem to agree on is that we don’t want a contract that focuses solely on pay. So we need to embrace this patchwork approach & stop begrudging each other our respective areas of focus if we want a truly excellent contract. (The irony of the FO in your example is that he will most likely ultimately end up enjoying the benefit he voted against & paying the associated penalty he voted to impose upon others- all in the name of “fairness”.)

That means there will be some things in this contract I benefit from more than others. There will be other things I won’t presently benefit from, but will probably benefit from in the future. And there will be some things I’m very unlikely to ever benefit from at all. I want all of those things.

 

Totally get it & believe me, as a guy who occasionally bids senior RSV even under current book- I’m into it. Senior RSV all the way. I’m just saying as only around 20% of flying is RSV, it’s a partial solution. Fixing trip credit & quality is another partial solution. And I think pay is also a partial solution.

One face of this problem is that the disparity between rates is such that during good times, senior FOs- even on the NB- can match or exceed NBCA pay pretty easily. Yes, that’s not always available, but aggregated over time, a lot of senior guys can approximate captain pay in the right seat. It’s not that upgrading would land them on RSV, or that they’re unwilling to fly the trips they’d be able to hold, it’s just that it won’t significantly impact their bottom line. And I think that’s a shame. (Not that they do well from the right seat, I don’t begrudge anyone that- I just think we miss out on the benefit of their experience & their incentive to upgrade should be better.) Now, maybe better staffing planning will reduce PPU and solve that problem on its own, but again, I say why wait for that iron to cool?

Essentially, we’re talking about three partial solutions (RSV rules, lineholder QOL, NBCA pay) that address three different faces of the issue, and my argument is, rather than fighting over which is the right one, let’s push for all three (swiss cheese model) as all of them provide a mutual benefit to the pilots & the airline.

 

Thanks for the explanation. Your point makes more sense now, but I still disagree. Pay rates aren’t the only changes. There are other parts of the contract that disproportionately affect everyone too. In the end, FO’s will eventually upgrade (most of them). So, in a sense it usually balances out as best as it can.