but no FAs

 

100% true

 

Youre only fooled because you think you know more than the EB or you contend they are lying to you. The facts, presented with copious evidence and history, is the company wasn’t going to negotiate. Had we voted the
e-TA’s down we’d be in the same spot without the pay raises, retirement bumps, and have a bigger hill to climb for contract 202X. It was a good outcome under crappy circumstances.

In order to prove voting no was the better solution you’d have to provide supporting evidence that the union would have been able to force UPS’s hand in coming earnestly to the table. I’m sure the EB consider this but either they realized that there would be nothing we could actually do or that we lacked the resolve to get it done. Considering when they asked us to do the work of one pilot but we failed miserably, reasonable to see their lack of faith. We have Tonia on the warpath right now and we could easily fix it if we all chose to fly as scheduled but that’s not happening. Heck, we can’t even get people to write simple ERs which the union has repeatedly asked for. So no, forcing UPS to the table was clearly not an option making the e-TAs the only outcome that benefited us. IMHO that was a gift from the company, surprised they even indulged in it and a huge fist bump to the EB for squeezing those drops out of a rock.

To your point regarding contract length - yeah, these 10yr cycles are total bs but that’s an RLA issue primarily.

 

Not sure why you disagree, you seem to be agreeing with almost everything I said:

1. Airlines optimize: even before the optimizer airlines were getting more and more efficient in their scheduling practices. PBS is a major example. Pairing constructions were being tweaked all along but the Optimizer kicked it into overdrive. The good schedules of days past were nothing more than scheduling inefficiencies they weren’t able to avoid due to unavailable technologies. Think multi day layovers, extensive positioning and depositioning, city purity, etc. Schedules we have now are what companies have been dreaming of but couldn’t figure out how to achieve. It all starts with the network. That’s the baseline everything starts from.

2. we get what the (network) + (optimizer) - (contract language) gives us. No, we can’t change the network but the postal contract certainly did.

3. Contract language forces the optimizer towards our preferences. Contract language is the only solutionfor ameliorating what the network + optimizer spits out. The problem is N+O and obtaining appropriate language in the next contract.

 

That’s certainly a valid argument for the second extension. What about the first one? We as a group made a very emotional decision when we voted for the first extension. I voted for it. COVID was just starting to take its effect, pax carriers would be talking furlough soon, and it looked very much like we were dodging a bullet. In hindsight, that proved not to be the case and we would have been negotiating a contract with what will probably have been the greatest leverage this pilot group will ever have. In reality, extension one set us up to be competing with IBT a couple years later for company negotiating assets. One could make an argument that our union leaders should’ve seen that coming. In hindsight, I, along with a large majority of this group made a decision based on fear and uncertainty in voting for extension 1. When rumors of a second extension started swirling, it became obvious that we had been duped into another exceedingly long contract cycle by UPS. I agree with you that we have a good team steering this union. I also believe that that team is far from infallible and that the extensions were a major misstep on our part. As I said before, re-litigation is futile and counterproductive. What’s done is done. The takeaway for our group should be that we need to deal with this company with eyes fully open all the time and quickly recognize any attempts by UPS to stall or push back full blown negotiations for what they are: A massive coup for UPS, and a significant loss for our pilot group.

 

Given no extension #1, we wouldn’t have had a TA by the time IBT negotiations started so still a hefty delay and at best, maybe a slightly earlier contract than what we will get. No one, including UPS, was privy to the realities of the O’Brien reign so not a genius move by UPS nor were we duped. EB made the best decision with the data they had at the time and we unanimously agreed (for the most part).

And let’s not forget that the latest legacy contracts weren’t a big hard fought union victory - there was immense pressure for the airlines to hire from a scarce pilot population. Their big pay CBA’s were a survival tactic probably engineered by corporate. UPS didn’t have that problem due to significantly lower staffing needs. Thus, we never had that leverage to use; not a missed golden opportunity as you say.

If you want to assign blame for what happened look towards the teamsters: we got kok-blocked by them, that’s all that really happened. Legacies don’t have that potential problem.

 

The problem with hindsight is its 20/20...but it doesn't acknowledge the situation *at the time*, only what the situation looks like well after the fact.

Every argument that "we'd have been negotiating a contract during our best leverage in history" is equally countered by "we'd be in the same basic situation as FDX" due in part to COVID.

Negotiations wouldn't have started in Sept 2020 due to everybody (Company and IPA) scrambling putting out fires all over the world, to include crewmembers locked up in Asia. There were no face-to-face meetings occuring in ANY airline contract negotiation during this time. It is entirely likely negotiations would not have started until late spring/early summer 2021, like they did for FDX, with joint application for NMB mediation delayed accordingly and no guarantee the NMB would have assigned us a mediator. While we all hope we'd have had a TA by summer 2025 had we started negotiating in summer 2021, there is no guarantee the timing of an agreement would have been advantagous to us. Our COVID volume started dropping in late 2022 and fell off a cliff in 2023 which led us to VTP in fall 2023 - anybody think we'd get industry leading after putting 200 people out the door early? POOF there goes the COVID leverage. Postal being announced in April 2024 admittedly changed the situation, but nobody can know how balls would have bounced on that or any other issue.

That whole time, our top pay rate would be $337.65 putting us in a MASSIVE hole compared to the Big 3's 2023 contracts, and we'd be nearing the end of the 2016 FDA runway.

The EB came to us twice and said "we think this is a good thing for these reasons", and 98% then 90% of the group agreed. While 10 year contract cycles (2006-2016, 2016-202x?) certainly limit opportunities to change language, my prognostication is we are in much better shape with the extensions than we'd have been without them. Thing is, that's just like my opinion man, and there's no way to know with certainty one way or another. We can AAR and second guess until we're blue in the face, but it won't change the decision made in the moment with the information that was available.

We started negotiations a few months early, we're negotiating twice a month before the 11Sept25 NMB joint application, Atlanta has been involved in our negotiations, and there's been more progress thus far than previous IPA negotiations. We'll see how quickly all that ultimately bears fruit, then we'll each have a say in accepting or rejecting whatever agreement is reached. We're not gonna get everything that everybody wants, but I personally think we're gonna move the ball down the field in a substantive manner from where we've been.

 

I hope the next contract has a provision to ban all endless conversations about whether the extensions were a good idea or not.

end of the day we were the highest paid and then got excited to get paid even more and have the first contract with captain pay starting with a 4. Then the pax got giant contracts and we are jealous now. Pretty simple stuff.

 

Just to add a bit of clarity to FDX starting in May of 2021, our contract wasn't amendable until Nov 2021. Our CBA dictates that openers can't start more than 180 days prior to the amendable date unless both parties agree to it. Our openers happened 180 days prior to the amendable date. We entered into expedited mediation 14 months later with the NMB.

 

Thanks for that.

Contractually we were due to start Sept 2020...but for a multitude of reasons I think the start of our timeline would have very closely matched yours.