I found that once I got on the upper pay scale of the 737 at CAL, my line values dropped. I currently only get 80 hour lines, which is totally fine by me. When I was newer and getting paid less, my line values were consistently 87 hour lines.

I'm convinced that CAL's PBS has an economic code program written into it. The less you make in your category, the more you are going to work. It's cheap labor for the company. When I was helping run PBS at my previous company (Chautauqua), we opted to keep the economic code out of our PBS in order to make it more fluid and honor seniority better. Would have been a nice if someone at CAL would have actually done research on this concept of PBS before voting it in on the last contract.

 

Funny how the company talks about how incredibly overstaffed we are and forces half the lineholders into minimum time, yet every time I put in a trade it is disallowed due to (you guessed it) NO COVERAGE.

 

I sure don't get it either gettingbumped.

 

Yep. Below the company's own minimum reserve coverage for almost every day of the month in each BES. The computer says one thing, but management says another.

 

Just the facts please ma'am . . .


For what it is worth, 767 FOs in IAD, JFK, and ORD (I haven't checked other bases) are all seeing 70 hour lines for a large percentage of the pilot group both in April and May. Don't know about June yet.



On a slightly different note:

Can CAL pilots see our line awards?

I was surprised to learn that if I sign on to Skynet I can go Inside CoAir > CO Divisions > Airport & Operations > Flight Operations > PBS and I can see all the CAL pilot PBS awards. Not that that is Earth shattering news just interesting to me.

A couple minor side notes I found by looking around CAL line awards.

1) A pilot with the same relative seniority as me (approx 55 to 60 percentile system wide) is flying the exact same trip I fly (a GVA layover on a 767).

2) Junior CAL trips on the 737s look a lot like our 757 flying and regrettably for me seems to lend credence to the CAL argument that their fleet is virtually the same as ours when looking at career expectations. (This is not an attempt to start a debate here regarding SLI - just my personal impression so please please please do NOT jump on this with a fight - just sharing some thoughts for those that might be interested)



Anyways, just thought I'd add a couple facts and thoughts




Joe Peck
IADFO-UAL76/75

 

Yes we at CAL can see your bid awards on skynet, it is nice to see the types of trips you guys fly and how your work rules help with pairing construction and line awards.

On a staffing note, our credit range for June on the 737 in IAH is 78-87 hours this is very high and goes to show we are short and this summer will be very tough on reserves and guys who answer their phones.

 

That was really well said. It is not Southwest management that makes Southwest successful. It is the way that Southwest management and SWAPA work together. Southwest pilots have never gotten a massive raise. When they were paid below market, they didn't complain and start a work slow down. They came to work, they did their job, and they got a respectable raise. Look where that got them.

The last part of your post was so good I feel the need to repeat it as I have never seen it worded so well...

Southwest's management could be brought in to run United and I have no doubt that the pilots would effectively tick them off. And then the pilots would again complain about how bad management is. Maybe, just maybe, the entire blame isn't in management's corner. I know that's a horrific thought; a subject never broached among UAL pilots.

 

If you think that will work with Jeff or any normal CEO, you're wrong. If you give, they'll just take. They will never give you a penny without a fight. It's a shame, but it's true. They don't care about "labor".

 

This is totally off topic but as that seems to be the norm for this site, I'll go with the flow.


The real trouble is that pilots are willing to work for a place like Southwest when it starts up. If we had a union with real meat to it, which is forbidden by the RLA but which works fine in Germany and France, I wouldn't have to fight for QWOL issues. Southwest pilots work harder than UAL pilots, but that is the battle being fought philosophically, politically, and in reality across our nation for the last 3 decades. Karl Marx recognized that capitalists allowed a totally free hand will treat their workers as close to slaves as possible and only through the combined efforts of organized labor can we counteract the overwhelming force massed against the workers of the world. As a global society we have the means to feed and clothe everyone many times over. We no longer need to work 80 hours a week or remain away from home 18 days of the month in order to feed our progeny. I for one look for continuing progress in labor contracts which give workers the choice of how much time they want to work and how much time they want to spend with their family. Contracts that force workers into being more "efficient" are regressive in my mind, but that runs counter to the entire ethos of the body politic in the USA today and for that we have the combination of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan who brought us the mantra that "Unions are the problem." They are not. The problem is that the capital that makes the world go round is ultimately owned by the workers but in reality is controlled by a select group of bankers for whom the laws of our nation are designed to favor. Dig down through the banks, pension funds, private equity firms, and shell corporations and ultimately you and I are the majority owners of almost every public corporation in the world, but the rules are designed to protect the interests of the intermediaries and not you and I. In effect we the proletarians of the USA have prostituted ourselves to the banks of the world.


I work 50 hours a month because I have built a level of wealth that allows me that pleasure, but that is because I understand how the cards are stacked against the working class. All I can say is that if everyone understood the stakes involved no one would ever go to work for a JetBlue or Southwest start up ever again. By the way that is a story of the young eating the old that has been told time and again going back to shipping lines in the days of the Greeks and continuing through the Railways at the turn of the last century and repeating yet again in our own industry. Watch carefully as the Southwest story comes to a crashing halt over the coming decade now that its workforce is approaching maturity.

For the record I have been short LUV and long UAL for several years now.



Joe Peck
IADFO-UAL76/75

 

How idiotic; work hard and get paid for it. Jeeesh, you're telling me! What's up with that? Where did America go wrong? Well, fortunately we're making up for it with nearly half of the country getting a gov't check for sitting at home. Finally, this nation is coming to its senses.