Let's accept that as true. PBS then is a transfer of "wealth" to people who can bid smart and know the system. As much as that should be everyone, it is not. Vacation conflict line bidding is very very simple. It does not require you to be smart or know the system. That's will be a real loss to some people even if PBS is implemented well.

 

You’re not wrong, but it’s hard to have a ton of sympathy for people who are too lazy to bother learning this one system that has such an enormous impact on their QoL. It would be like running for president without understanding how the electoral college works… I’m sorry it’s not totally intuitive at a glance, but at some point, you need to be an adult and figure it out.

 

What about the use of leverage to improve other contract asks before they give the concession of PBS to the company? The company came back with new pitches on previously agreed upon items.

 

So then you're not telling the whole story and clearly counting days in an adjacent month to make that math work.

Those pilots either don't understand how much better good line bidding is, or they just want to see the FAs suffer under PBS.

Imagine if everyone knew the ins and outs of PBS to the maximum, being smart and knowing the system wouldn't be very useful at that point for anyone.

 

Yea I didn't tell the whole story because I dont have to with you fools. I was able to use PBS on two separate months of bidding to get 28 days off (in a row) with only one week of vacation. because I took time to figure out the system to make it work for me. Can line bidding do that? Like someone said, garbage in garbage out. If you hide your head in the sand because youre scared of something new the company wants, then youre going to lose something else in your negotiating to keep line bidding.

The FA's also dont understand that we only use PBS for bidding our monthly schedule. Its only valid the day it comes out, and then we use trading systems to massage and manipulate our schedule the way we want. Probably just like they do to swap all their stuff around. We only touch PBS once a month. I use CC to do my swapping.

Plus, at some point it doesnt matter if you wrote the software to PBS and know it inside and out. Your personal seniority gets you what everyone senior to you doesn't want.

FA's, get some unity. If you're jealous of what we have, get a stronger negotiating committee. Remember, we gave a big middle finger to the TUMI TA

 

I do better every month of every year under PBS. Sure line bidding is great durring training or vacation months but the rest of the year it blows.

line bidding maybe I could find a half dozen lines that are 99% what I want and a couple dozen that are 80%. And If I can’t hold them my schedule is a compromise. With PBS I can cherry pick exactly what I want every month.

 

71% no vote is still fairly unified, wouldn’t you say?

 

PBS is demonstrably better than paper line bidding for one simple reason. One man's trash is another man's treasure and PBS gives more people more of what they want than paper line bidding could ever do. It is common sense. Yes, you lose the opportunity for a financial windfall from vacation override, but it is dwarfed by other QOL and financial gains. It's not even close.

Trip trading is a function of manning and open trip seeding with both systems.

 

The whole line bidding thing is about conflicts. You can make many co nflicts with vacation, training, overlapping trips, etc......

There is somewhere around 20% less manpower needed for PBS vs line bidding.

This is the sticking point. Problem is FAs are willing to die on that sword and want everything other airlines get without giving up line bidding. Never gonna happen. Thats why they had deep sacrifices in their offer from company with keeping line bidding.

 

I agree with the rest of your post, but 20% sounds way too high. Where did you get that estimate?

One thing that is very different with pilots' situation is we can gain seniority relatively quickly by staying put whereas the F/As are only divided by base. PBS might give even more benefits to the senior F/As, but not sure about all those implications.