What would pay protection for reserves include?
As a reserve pilot, I'm presently pay protected by:
- MMG
- min day credit
- min-day credit for unused reserve days if I go over 75 hrs
What are you thinking?
And yeah, my biggest issues for the next contract are that we make it too expensive for crew utilization to be stupid, lazy and inefficient. I want to force them to either do their jobs half competently or pay through the nose for it.
I thought the same thing about this little gem in our contract. I thought I qualified for this one month only to find out that in reality, it works like this... Let's say you're credited at 95 hours for the month and blocked at 80. You also have two "unused reserve days" on your schedule for the month. I'm sure you're thinking, "In this case I would get min day times two added to the 95 hours of credit, resulting in a new credit for the month of ~102.7, right?"
WRONG!!! If your read the contract closely, the way it works is you take the two unused reserve days credit and add it to BLOCK (in our case, 80, resulting in a new total of ~87.7. Because 87.7 is less than your CREDIT of 95, those two unused reserve days earned you a grand total of... (wait for it...) ZERO, ZILCH, NADA, NOTHING!
Because of all of the soft credits we earn throught deadheads, min day, ect., this provision in the contract is practically worthless, as you will rarely, if ever, have enough unused reserve days to get the total of block plus this credit to take you over the credit you already have for the month.
Surely, this provision was intended as a deterrent to prevent scheduling from flying reserves over guarantee without consequence (and don't call me Shirley!) Instead, it became just another example of how switching one word in the language (block vs credit) renders the entire provision worthless and proof positive why we need concrete language in our next contract that actually delivers on what was intended in the first place.
