Everyone who has posted here as not being in favor of a pilot split has cited many reasons other than the "protections" that their contract provides.
-Minimum duty days: as I have said before, I have no desire to be flogged up and down the Eastern seaboard for 14 hours, and I fully believe that if we tamper with the duty day limitations that is exactly what they'll do. It won't be a PHL-LAX, LAX-PHL. It'll be some other rancid configuration. And guess who will get it most of the time? Reserves. As many have told you, not all of us want to kill ourselves with a 14 hour hard time day. What about the poor reserve who has toddlers at home? Or umm a life?
Your response: We want high time trips. Build in the contract limitations and rules to prevent abuse.
Mine: No thanks. I've seen how this management respects our contract. The words "Grieve it" are ingrained in their vocabulary and leave the flight attendant up a tree. Any murky shade of grey in the language and they drive a truck through it. Me, I'm practical I want the simplest solution to the reality of the situation. I could care less what it says, what they will DO with it is my concern.
-What I also said is that prudent people will wait and see what the FAA coughs up regarding fatigue before negotiating because we might get what we want for free, and not have to use valuable negotiating dollars.
Your response: You want a contract NOW, not when the pilots can sort their mess out.
Mine: Understood. But knowing the new rules will give leverage that wasn't there before. I believe that they are worth waiting for. Not to mention that there are so many open sections of this non existent tentative it might as well be a blank piece of paper. Even if you got your way and they motored under the premise of Pilot-FA split, you're still not going to see a contract before late 2010, most likely 2011.
-Hotels. Well, I've seen this in action and we're still linked. AWA has plopped FAs in hotels that are dangerous, seedy, unclean and bug infested. If you don't think that they'll find a way to degrade our hotels you're crazy. The only thing that got the crew out of a European hotel when the AC didn't work was the pilots threatening too fatigued to fly because they couldn't sleep.
For the company this is simple: it's tough to replace pilots, it's a week to replace FAs. Keep the pilots reasonably happy and screw the FAs. Now obviously we don't have happy pilots, but there are certain things that are easier when you're paired.
-Pilot Issue: I think every FA is in agreement on this. No, we don't want to wait for them, at the same time we want to proceed with extreme caution. Once this is given away you NEVER get it back, even allowing this discussion is dangerous IMHO, because it may be difficult to backtrack if it proves, as I am pretty sure that it will, not worth what the company wants to pay for it.
Finally, why is ANYONE in the mood to GIVE UP anything? As I've said, this is about GAIN.
A note: This non existent contract isn't even at 25%. US FAs are pretty cool people. It would be nice if we could respect eachother's opinions without derision of any kind. Make your best argument, if you don't convince, don't stoop to name calling. There's a thread that has that nonsense already, it certainly isn't reflective of the majority of FAs at US. By in large, we're a nice bunch.
