What about future hires? Why not DROP first year pay and eliminate health care all together in order to add to your seemingly very finite amount of negotiating capital? Why not make the first 3 years at $hitty pay to even further raise pay and benefits for the top 2/3 of the list? Management laughs at the unions quick acceptance of first year pay as a 2 shot technical for them even before the game has started. "Doesn't affect me. Who cares?"
I'm sorry... I didn't realize you'd been reading our T.A. here at AirTran.
Seriously, that's exactly what they did. Robbed the new-hires by dropping them $4.00 an hour and robbed the retirees by no longer paying their portion of the health insurance (which makes premiums a MINIMUM of $1,000 a month, mostly higher for most pilots), and gutted the reserve scheduling section to allow them to staff fewer bodies on reserve (Movable-Days-Off).
All that money is what makes up the BULK of the pay raises the senior pilots saw.
I disagree with the whole "finite bargaining power" approach to negotiations. When you first enter negotiations, you should put COLA raises on the table as a zero-bargaining item, meaning, the company has to give you those before you even START to talk about other areas of the contract.
The cost of fuel goes up. The cost of catering supplies goes up. The costs of leases go up. They don't get "concessions" from those vendors, it's just a fact of life that prices go up for airlines and they raise fares to compensate, just like everyone else.
If your airline is profitable (not in bankruptcy or bleeding cash), there's absolutely ZERO reason they should expect employee salaries to stay flat when nothing else does. COLA is NOT a bargaining chip. Anything above COLA? Certainly, has to be negotiated for. But not the basic cost of living raise.
This is where negotiating committees go astray and where Management now thinks they can get away with that at-will.
TC
