US Airways East ALPA MEC Conference Call Update

[Bud8EE]

a. Preserve jobs.
b. Avoid windfalls to either group at the expense of the other.
c. Maintain or improve pre-merger pay and standard of living.
d. Maintain or improve pre-merger pilot status.
e. Minimize detrimental changes to career expectations.

Objectively quantify any of those without opinionated agruments, or spreadsheets that paint the statistics the way you think it should be. No one can, as any of those are arguments based on speculation and the entire process is subjective and colored by an individuals point of view.

Everybody is different and the results could have varied from one arbitrator to the next. A process like that is fundamentally flawed, and does not comport to unionist solidarity in any way.

If a group of individuals is affected by a flawed policy, and an ineffective union, they ought to fight it because they didn't pick the policy. It was imposed on them by the political powers to be and the pet projects of a 50,000 member union that isn't a union at all and hardly an orginization.

 

[aquagreen73s]

Now is so much better for the profession, and your group is going to get such a good deal from the company that the (East) pilots will just give up their seniority without a fight because of the generosity of it all.

Now for reality, they will probably stonewall integration by not rushing to a single contract or just voting it down. Who can blame them?

Whatever happens in the future will happen regardless of the arbitration and the East's actions. They can certainly disrupt and affect Doug's plans, but the total result will amount to nothing more than a footnote. The tectonic movement of this industry will shape the futures of all pilots, not just AWA and AAA, and right now the movement is clearly towards consolidation.

I said it before that this arbitration will go down in history as yet another mile marker on the road to ending deregulation. It's safe to say that DOH is effectively dead and it's death will help facilitate the movement towards consolidation. The thirty some odd year experiment called deregulation did nothing to help revenues and everything to destabilize an industry which was functioning just fine on its own. I doubt our current population of business travelers were around in the day where flights flew on time, seats and aircraft were clean, and they weren't fighting with the Disneyland crowd for an aisle seat or overhead bin space. The race to the bottom was only possible by mortgaging fiscally sound airlines and when that cash ran out, then by shaking down the employees. Deregulation also spawned this bizarre notion that yield sat second chair to market share and that anything which increased market share was worth it. Hence, the RJs, with costs twice that of a mainliner. But it just wasn't working and by the end of the 90s, every carrier was suffering from plummeting fares and overcapacity. Crazy but catchy ideas came from the crystal palaces such as United Shuttle, Metrojet, and perhaps the king of all crazy ideas - Jim Goodwin's executive jet/UAL merger. But nothing was working and the gig was under great stress. The wizards behind the curtain were wondering what the world to do about it until the mother of all geopolitical crisis provided everything they needed for yet more shakedowns and outsourcing of mainline jobs. Did it ultimately save money? No, but with a national pilots union asleep at the helm, airline executives had a blank check to squeeze and squeeze pilots. Well, here we are nearly six years after 9/11 and...it's still not working. Doug and Glenn see it for what it is - that the grand experiment is a failure and are at least honest about the remedy. Consolidation is the only way out of this mess.

 

[ussnark]

What I don't understand is how anyone that worked for East pre-merger could think they had any career expectations at all except at another carrier.

US was doing fine until the Tempe morons took over......

Shares

Worst aircraft maintenance, ever

Jerry Glass, got his mojo dealing with you.....

Actually showing a profit, without you.

Lower costs, without you.

Alcohol was not a public problem at East.

Was, service with a smile. Now, service is the smile. That's it.

Because of the "merger", I would expect east and west employees career expectations to last, uh, about two years, max. Before, separately, pilots would progress normally. Now, expect furloughs as Tempe tries to recapture the way they used to do things, things that worked before, as a tiny carrier. Been there, done that.

 

[Bear96]

Objectively quantify any of those without opinionated agruments, or spreadsheets that paint the statistics the way you think it should be. No one can, as any of those are arguments based on speculation and the entire process is subjective and colored by an individuals point of view.

Everybody is different and the results could have varied from one arbitrator to the next.

True.

But that is the way ALPA wanted it.

ALPA could have chosen a purely objective method such as DOH. But it didn't. It (and by extension, the members it represents) presumably preferred a more subjective system for various reasons. Concerns about subjectivity, etc., should have been hashed out when the merger policy proposal was brought up and debated prior to its implementation.

You can't change the rules because you don't like their application after a decision has been issued.

 

[luvn737s]

I said it before that this arbitration will go down in history as yet another mile marker on the road to ending deregulation.

Nah, the public would rather have a continuous churning of carriers than to have a government agency dole out the industry lottery tickets.

The airline industry is sound. The participants are all messed up.

 

[aquagreen73s]

Nah, the public would rather have a continuous churning of carriers than to have a government agency dole out the industry lottery tickets.

The airline industry is sound. The participants are all messed up.

I'm not saying we're headed for re-regulation. What I'm saying is that the airlines cannot continue in this madness. Other than re-regulation, the only way out is through consolidation. In a decade, our industry will look a lot like the oil industry.

 

[AWA320]

So Dave Odell can benefit from the International opportunities that the USAir's route system brought to the new airline instead of the guy who had spent 16 years there or the 1985 hire who went behind a 2000 hire that was 9 years old when he was landing DC9's in Ithica, NY in the winter. They are simply better of enjoying the 35% raises that come with upgrade, the raises that come with holding a line or moving up to higher paying equipment. USAir's(East) attrition will create 900 vacancies in the next 30 months and not working to a single contact only allows all that to happen.

Bud,

You are focusing on that which is unimportant and selfish. If a person had 16 years in he is now furloughed and has been for the past six years. Dave has been working since he was hired at AWA. This transation has allowed east furloughs the opportunity to come back to a combined new carrier for which they never would have otherwise. This overwelming sense of entitlement is just plain selfish. I think that we will never get past this now as it is apparent that unless your pilots are given DOH at the expense of our pilots we will keep down this path.

ALPA can not and will not interfere on your behalf. I wish you and the rest of the east pilot group well. I am more that certain that you will waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on a usless effort that will only serve to divide us further when all the east's efforts fail. Good luck and God bless...

 

[GNIDMD]

http://www.dailymotion.com/GNIDMD/video/x1...est-pilot-senio

 

[CV580ETOPS]

Who says he didn't ascribe realistic expectations - the side that yells the loudest?

Ditto...

Odd, that's exactly what I thought all the "That X year West SOB shouldn't be above our Y year pilot" was about - who's where on the seniority list.

No - what happened is just another case of expectations gone unfilled. The East merger committee attempted to warn the pilots that expecting DOH was unrealistic. They posted past rulings by this arbitrator showing that DOH was unrealistic. The committee computer guru that created all the projections showing the effects of attrition said that expecting DOH was unrealistic.

Some portion of the pilot group very vocally refused to accept anything but DOH and literally forced the MC argue a losing case. Now that the warnings have come true, that portion of the pilot group still refuses to accept that their expectations were unrealistic and demands "justice".

Jim

Bet there isn't an AWA pilot in PHX right now that wouldn't like to buy you a beer. Very well summation of events. Best wishes in your retirement.

 

[desertgal]

Y'all, thank you for the distraction.
Today I was facing serious issues such as a mother in ICU, a child struggling in school, another sick child, and a checking account with a zero balance.

I knew a couple glasses of red and a visit to this forum to see what the whiners were crying about would distract me.
Very predictable and entertaining.

Thank goodness I can realize that posters on this forum do not represent the majority from either former entity.
Kudos to BoeingBoy for always being the voice of sanity and common sense, and aquagreen for that extremely intelligent post. (with no misspellings even!)

It seems to me that the arbitrator addressed each point he was meant to exactly and fairly as he was bound to.
Each pilot brings to the merged list the same job he had going into the merger.
New company, new list, new expectations.

Good luck, God bless, and I look forward to flying with most of you.
Some of you, judging by your nutty irrational posts on this forum, would be a nightmare and a danger to fly with.
God bless you too.
Y'all are in my prayers.

 

[EastUS]

I think you had better start looking into the future. This management is actively looking at another merger in fact I would suspect that it would take place sometime this fall.

That's actually perceived out east as being yet another viable reason NOT to rush into a mass seniority flush.

This is truly a hideous mess on all fronts...and I do not see any immediate happy endings for anyone.

 

[Bud8EE]

Bud,

You are focusing on that which is unimportant and selfish. If a person had 16 years in he is now furloughed and has been for the past six years. Dave has been working since he was hired at AWA. This transation has allowed east furloughs the opportunity to come back to a combined new carrier for which they never would have otherwise. This overwelming sense of entitlement is just plain selfish. I think that we will never get past this now as it is apparent that unless your pilots are given DOH at the expense of our pilots we will keep down this path.

ALPA can not and will not interfere on your behalf. I wish you and the rest of the east pilot group well. I am more that certain that you will waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on a usless effort that will only serve to divide us further when all the east's efforts fail. Good luck and God bless...

You don't need to wish me good luck, I am not the one that works there. I should be wishing you good luck, because I can tell you exactly how it will turn out. The mess ALPA just created will be as bad or worse than Allegehny allowing pilots on another seniority list to code share in 1967, or the B-scale at American in 1983 or "pattern bargaining" of the last 15+. Whether your are in perpetual whipsaw with two contracts or get a contract shoved down your throat as one group because management knows the pilots at USAir will never be unified. The company is shrewd enough to know many will have to look over their shoulder because many of the guys behind them staring at the back of their head that believe their career was torpedoed and might be ready to take it back, if the opportunity arose. You can argue all night, whether that feeling is justified, just like you can argue the tenets of the merger "non-policy", which is the problem. The company will know any threatened action would be a bluff, and might actually take the union up on it because it could very well mean the end of the union. Your company and career will bear the brunt of it, if it survives this mess but every pilot group will feel its effects just as the outsourcing that started way back in 1967, still has a huge impact on this profession today.

 

[ableoneable]

The National Seniority List.

A nice idea that could never have happened.

The problem is how do you convince the pilots hired at a start-up (Jet Blue etc.) to join your DOH union? The pilots at all of the established carriers see the advantages of the national list but a start-up pilot group would be insane to join up.

No matter what policy ALPA adopted twenty or thirty years ago, a national list would never have extended beyond the borders of the carriers established at the time the original national list was generated.

The only way it could have worked is if ALPA was not just a union but a pilot services company that completely controlled the pilot supply. (i.e. If you were going to start an airline you had to go to ALPA for pilot staffing. ALPA would hire, train and supply your crews, almost as through a wet lease.) For this to have worked the law would have had to specify ALPA, or whatever you want to call it, as the sole legal source of cockpit crews.

ALPA could not even manage the commuter, or as it is now called, the regional airline problem.

Scope was never a good solution. ALPA should have fought for real wages for the regional guys thirty years ago, instead of just saying; "You can't have those guys fly anything big, we get all of that, but you can pay them whatever you can get away with."

How can you think a national list would have worked when ALPA could not even manage to keep the regional fleet from being a whip saw?

In UAL's last pre 9-11 contract they had the chance to bring the RJs back under the mainline umbrella but the UAL ALPA unit told management that a mainling capt must earn over 100K no matter what the a/c size.

To this day we have pilots at AWA who think it was a mistake to vote to bring the E-190 under the mainline umbrella because the initial pay rates were too low. The winning arguement was that you can always negotiate a higher pay rate later but once those aircraft are at Mesa, ASA, whatever, they are gone forever. We still have people here who think it would have been better to stick to our guns on pay and see Mesa fly the 190.

 

[aquagreen73s]

To this day we have pilots at AWA who think it was a mistake to vote to bring the E-190 under the mainline umbrella because the initial pay rates were too low.

Coincidentally, those same folks are the ardent age 65 supporters. I wonder if we can read into that coincidence . . .