The Current Negotiating Environment
 

What is going on? We have a series of Tentative Agreements from Delta, FedEx, and Southwest that are largely concessionary in an environment that is conducive to large gains by each associated pilot group. I'm concerned about the union leadership (or lack thereof). No one seems to want to move the ball forward. I can't believe that these agreements have actually reached the pilot groups. It's mystifying!!! I hope that our MEC doesn't lay down like the union leadership from the airlines listed above.

I think it's much more complicated than that. This goes to highlight just how stacked against us the railway labor act is. Even in good times there is little incentive for management to negotiate up. It requires pressure and leverage, something the pilot group is limited in by law. I suspect that the substandard TA's being brought forward to the pilot groups are to create that leverage

Allow me...I'll be very quick.

The industry with the final three "legacies" and Southwest, is consolidated and fiercely competitive. No surviving management group at any surviving company is going to bless a deal that would put them at a competitive disadvantage with their industry peer companies. With an approximate +20% domestic market share at each of the four survivors, it minimizes the leverage obtainable from the NMB in a Sec 6 negotiation...too much potential for too much disruption. The MEC's likely did the best they could under consolidated circumstances.

There are a number of other issues related to your observation, but that's enough (no one reads this stuff anyways:)).

I truly wish you the best in Sec 6.

I agree with you; mostly. I hope (probably forlornly) that maybe there could be some management people with foresight beyond the end of the quarter, or the end of their nose for that matter, that could see the value of happy employees in a customer service industry. I admit it's difficult to precisely quantify this in the short term but the logic of it is irrefutable to those of us out in the operation daily and it is achievable without a disproportionate or uncompetitive increase in costs.

By the way, I didn't even begin to invent this. Paging Mr Kelleher. Paging Mr Bethune. Paging Mr Patterson.

A lowering our expectation thread already, how nice. Wait, next is a possible furlough or even bankruptcy. You never know.

I was actually raising them

Concessionary is a little strong of word. Being that each of these deals increased pilot costs as a whole, and that we have all truly been affected by concessionary deals the past ten years. I think it is a stretch. Now I agree that they have not raised the bar high enough.

It's interesting you'd like to conjure up the people they taught Jeffy how to lie, cheat, bribe and steal. I guess you could put a dress on it but it still a pig. Why not hope for a brighter future instead of reliving a checkered past.

How do you define "concessionary?"

If you mean that each and every section and paragraph of the contract doesn't show improvements and some even show some reductions, then every contract in my almost 38 years has been concessionary.

What do you want?

Money, duty rigs, commuting ease, base availability, easy reserve (no short calls), or what?

Everything has a price and to broadly call something "concessionary" is being intellectually dishonest (and a bit hyperbolic).

If there were "good old" days in this industry would someone please let me know when that was. It's been a fight with management for the whole time I've been at UAL, so I don't know what some seem to expect.

On the counter-point, people are asking pretty smart, pragmatic questions.

This industry has changed fundamentally over the last 35+ years. "Pattern Bargaining" (or "leapfrog" as we liked to call it) was a phenomenon that grew out of the regulated environment when there was less cost pressure to settle. The market forces are very different and very powerful today.

It isn't the industry in which your dad or grandfather flew...mine either.