Originally Posted by Mitch Rapp05

Again, as rough as it may sound, furloughs are FORMER employees of United and have as much career expectations as Joe Pilot at Express whose Dad is a chief pilot.

Originally Posted by Captain Bligh

Mitch, with all due respect it seems you have much to learn about the culture CAL management brings to the new airline. It has been our experience that if your dad was chief pilot or you were willing to leave your ALPA position for a job in the training department, your career expectations were quite high...

Originally Posted by Maxepr1

So would a person who took a voluntary furlough have no career expectations since they left on their own?, maybe for hopes of something better. Should the forced furlough guys go ahead of them? Just a question..... Max

Originally Posted by untied

Yeah.....then ALPA merger policy was Changed!

Don't forget that ALPA lost AAA/AWA due to the crappy old SLI policy. The policy has been changed...

Originally Posted by untied

...and the arbitrator MUST adhere to it.

Originally Posted by untied

Past SLI arguments are useless.

Originally Posted by DALMD88FO

As you can see I'm a Delta guy and don't have a dog in this hunt. What I will tell you from experience is that once it goes to arbitration all bets are off. Here are some short shots from the Delta/NWA merger:

1. It didn't matter that the majority of Delta aircraft paid more than NWA they just broke it down as widebody and narrowbody.

2. The did a stovepipe (which means they ordered the seniority list as to what you could actually hold so it didn't matter what seat you were actually in)

3. They merged the two lists (within a percent or 2 depending on where you sat on the list) so that ended up with about your same relative seniority.

4. They didn't care if you had a bunch of dinosaur aircraft that were approaching the end of their cycle life or if your seniority list had a huge number of guys retire early.

So basically they just looked at what type of seats you brought to the dance and merged them via a ratio by your size. We didn't have any furloughee's, however if we had they wouldn't have had a seat to merge into the list and as such would have been on the bottom.

The arbitrators didn't care about your date of hire as we had new hires (07) merged with 01 hires that had been furloughed.

Just remember you are now along for the ride since you signed off on the joint contract.

Originally Posted by 13n144e

The "crappy old" ALPA merger policy wasn't "changed" - the verbage was just revised to be a little more concise. That's very nearly a quote from someone who was actually on board for the revision of said verbage.

The arbitrators can pretty much do whatever the hell they want. They have extensive latitude and are not limited or confined to the items specified in the merger policy. Kinda like the Pirate's Code - "it's more just a general guideline."


Hardly. These individuals are all professional arbitrators. They're not going to blow their professional cache by going completely off the ranch and bucking all past precedent. Disabuse yourself of that notion as soon as possible.

Originally Posted by untied

Yeah, you're probably right.

They'll probably just look at the most junior captain in EWR and base the whole SLI on THAT!

Originally Posted by Baron50

To answer your question, yes it is reasonable. The UAL furloughees have a vesting. They were identified by UAL management to eventually be the senior pilots at UAL through the normal process of age attrition. Absent a merger, no one on earth would be entitled to sit in the UAL pilot seats 20 or 30 years from now. So, if you thought for a moment this entitlement is without value, consider how many pilots would trade their current position for a slot on the UAL furlough list.

Furloughee's have a career expectation in order of seniority, a pilot that is simply unemployed does not and that is the difference between those working and those temporarily unemployed through no fault of their own. These folks have rights to a UAL job unavailable to anyone else.

Consider a world where the lists were not put together, the furloughees, in time, would return, fly a career and retire at a certain seniority, based on their age, notwithstanding other types of attrition. This is quantifiable, without too much effort a career earnings could be calculated, even for someone that is furloughed today. The arb will look at all of this and then decide, but to say furlough status predetermines a particular outcome would be ill advised.

Originally Posted by HSLD

Don't let the fact that UAL furloughees have a seniority number on the current list, are defined as a status category by union policy, and have 10 year recall rights get in your way. Just like Joe pilot at Express, right

Originally Posted by Captain Bligh

Mitch, with all due respect it seems you have much to learn about the culture CAL management brings to the new airline. It has been our experience that if your dad was chief pilot or you were willing to leave your ALPA position for a job in the training department, your career expectations were quite high...