Comair Vote Results ???

[Berry McCockner]

Surplus, I can respect your decision to save your capt slot and a 9% paycut instead of being displaced to an FO. In the end everyone is looking out for themselves. But what is it worth to you? What happens when Freddo comes back and says that he needs more. If conex, mesaba, asa, and all the others lower their costs then cmr will be at the high end again. Will you then take another cut? When does it end? What is your job worth to you? How low are you willing to go? To the bottom? You are a sellout to yourself. Stand up for what you are worth.

 

[surplus1]

I am proud of anyone who voted yes, thus condeming the FO group to four years of poverty. You are happy now, paying your mortgage and feeding your family. But FOs cannot... We will not make $35k-$40k a year for the next four years. FOs will make less than CHQ and barely above Mesa...

In 1992 I voted against a TA that did not provide 60% of captains pay to FO's. In 1994 we achieved 60% for FO's (among other things) and I voted YES. So did the majority. I'm sure you were not here at that time. Nevertheless, I must tell you that the 60% was a first on the regional side and it came at the expense of significantly lower pay for every Captain.

In 1996 when the company was not honoring our 1994 contract, we fought tooth and nail and I along with many others help to achieve major improvements mid-contract. Those changes got your premium pay, your displacement pay, your filling of vacancies protections, improvements in reserve duty and reserve reassignments, etc. In most cases the imporvements benefited First Officers more than captains.

In 2001 we all paid a heavy price to keep the FO percentage and improve the pay rates of new hires, FO's and Captains and a host of other improvements for all of us. We had to strike for 89 days and vote down 2 "last and best offers" to do it. We did.

My point is that I don't think you were here then either. That's not your fault. But, you do need to consider the fact that the $35-40K that you have been enjoying, the pay that I have been enjoying and the benefits that we all had before this POS, were bought and paid for by those of us who came before you. They were not handed to us on a silver platter. We paid for them with years of sweat and tears so that you and others like you could come along and share them with those of us who earned them.

Things beyond our control have now taken a different turn and we are once more called upon to make sacrifices, very big ones, in an effort to survive. None of us is exempt from that call.

If you don't know, then you should know that your negotiating committee did NOT make a decision to "sacrifice First Officers" for the benefit of Captains. They didn't propose this crap and they didn't accept this crap because they thought it was a good idea. Neither did any of the rests of us. We all know that this is a lousy deal!

NO, it isn't something to be proud of. It is something that we had to do today if we are going to be able to do anything tomorrow.

YES, First Officer pay is now bad. But guess what? You will still be paid MORE than REP, PSA, TSA, MDA, MSA, PCL and MES. Those are the people you need to be upset with.

Is that the kind of quality you want in your right seat? You get what you pay for.

The quality of the person in my right seat was not determined by the pay rate before this and it won't be determined by the pay rate after this. I was getting more than we pay for before and that won't change. I realize you are angry and you have a right to be. I am angry too. I didn't vote for this because I like it. I voted becuse in my opinion I didn't have a choice.

Captains didn't walk away from this with a good deal my friend. I was able to list above 7 airlines that you will still be paid more than. You know what, I can only list 2 airlines that captains will be paid more than. They are ASA and MES. Don't think that captains came out ahead with this deal, we didn't. It sucks for everyone.

The company did propose a common rate for both Captains and FO's I don't know why it wound up the way it did, I wasn't at the table. My guess is the reason it came out that way is because that is what the overwhelming majority of regional airlines do. In fact I can only find 3 airlines that pay a type differential for Jet FO and they are AWAC, PSA and ASA. AWAC pays a differential in the BAE146, not the CRJ. PSA still pays less in both types. I'm sure the company just copied the others and rammed it down our throats. Comiar captains didn't make that decision, it was made for us by other airlines.

You need to understand that others have been undercutting us for years. Don't blame Comair captains for that. This captain has sympathy for ALL of us. There is nothing good about this deal.

We just recently lost about 8,000 hours of block time. Who did we lose it to? Mesa. Why do you think that happened? Becuse Mesa underbid us and literally "paid" Delta for the business. That's the cut-throat enviroment that we live in. Comair captains are NOT reponsible for that. You're taking your justified anger out on the wrong people.

As for Fred getting the captains vote, please smell the coffee. Fred didn't call these shots, Delta did. He's just the messenger. What he can do will remain limited as long as we are "owned" by Delta. If another airline should buy us, they may keep Fred or they may replace him. We could do worse. Don't blame Fred, he's a victim just like you and me.

I am proud to vote no, because there was no urgency to vote yes at this moment in time. Why have we allowed the company drag out our previous contract negotiations?

You are now talking about two different things. The first is a matter of opinion. I think there was great urgency now and you don't that's an honest difference of opinion. You could be right, so could I.

As for "allowing" the company to drag out our previous contract negotiations we have never done that. The National Mediation Board allows companies to drag out negotiations. Pilot groups do not control the NMB and have to comply with the law. If you would like a more favorable NMB, try electing a different President for starters and a different Congress as a follow up.

 

[172driver]

Maybe you posted before reading my response, but if not, you need to reread it.

YES, First Officer pay is now bad. But guess what? You will still be paid MORE than REP, PSA, TSA, MDA, MSA, PCL and MES. Those are the people you need to be upset with.

NOT TRUE!!! We are lower than all but Mesa, FO's and CA's. I wish people would've analyzed this a little more closely before voting ignorantly, or maybe where we fit in the industry wasn't an important factor?

I do not want to hear that we should be angry at CHQ or Mesa ever again. We did this all by ourselves, took the largest concession in years.

 

[surplus1]

Surplus,

I generally respect and agree with your opinion, but you are way off base on this one. You have no right to attack me on the basis of one sentence in a flightinfo post. You certainly seem to have made a lot of assumptions on why you think I voted the way I did. Because I said, in the end, my decision came down to my needs, you assume I took no one else into consideration?

First of all I apologize for coming on so strong against your statements. We’re all up tight about this and that includes me. Nevertheless, it is true that what you said pi_ssed me off big time. I apologize for letting you cause me to get angry but I don’t apologize for what I said in response to your statements, I meant every word of it. I think you meant it too for you haven’t taken back a single word.

I did not assume anything about why you voted the way you did. I simply read what you wrote and believed that you meant what you said. If you did NOT mean that you voted NO because you “had nothing to lose”, then you should not have said that. If you did NOT mean that you were “embarrassed to wear our uniform”, you should not have said so. If you did NOT mean that you “no longer wish to be associated with this group of pilots”, you should not have said that. All that I did was take you at your own word. You have said nothing to retract any of your statements.

I accept your right to be angry about this. I’m angry too. However, no matter how angry you may be I don’t expect you to say things that you do not mean and I cannot accept what you did say in silence. Once you have uttered or written those words it is virtually impossible to take them back. You haven’t made any effort to do so. Therefore I can only presume that I did not misunderstand you.

This is only Flightinfo, but it is a public forum. What you say here is read by every tom, dick and harry, not just Comair pilots. Whenever I read what I see as an attack on this pilot group I will respond to it. I’m a Comair pilot and I’m not embarrassed to wear my uniform or ashamed to be associated with this group; I’m proud of that association. I wish you were too.

I definitely weighed the needs of every employee in this company, my needs, my family, and the other pilots in the industry before I came to a decision. You assumed otherwise.

The only thing I assumed was that you meant what you said. If you did take all those things into consideration, then what did you mean by saying you had “nothing to lose”? It seems you have just as much to lose as any of us.

If you considered all those factors then you considered one thing that I did NOT consider. I did not spend even one second considering “other pilots in the industry.” Over the years I have come to learn (there have been more years than you can imagine) that other pilots in the industry never consider my pilot group when they make their decisions. The evidence of that is all around us for more than 30 years that I know about personally and a he!! of a lot longer that I’ve read about. Is that good? No, it isn’t but I can’t do anything about it. The only thing I can affect is what happens in my own group. So, I treat the others the same way that they treat us. Saving the profession is a nice idea but in order to do that you must first save yourself. You don’t save the profession by committing suicide. I can guarantee that a month after we go out of business 90% won’t remember our name. A year later none of them will. Sad maybe, but true.

Probably the biggest factor in my process, as I said earlier, was that these new rates do not pay fair market value for a CRJ FO, nor for a pilot with my level of experience.

I agree that these new rates do not pay fair value for anyone, not just FO’s. Unfortunately there is nothing “fair” about business it all operates by the golden rule, which means that the man with the gold makes the rules. In this case the man with the gold is flat broke but he still has the power to make the rules.

In the piloting profession your pay is never determined by your “level of experience”. It is determined by your seniority in your airline and the type of equipment that your airline operates. When I was first hired here my pay was $12.67 per hr. and all the BS I could stand. The airplane that I flew, if you took its wings off and laid them next to the fuselage, was literally small enough to be carried in the cargo compartment of the airplane that I flew previously. I had more time in the traffic pattern than the kid in the left seat had total time. He had the number I had the experience, and that experience didn’t amount to a single digit on my W2. I assure you, pay has nothing to do with experience when you’re an airline pilot. When you get hired by a new company they pay you whatever happens to be their new-hire pay and not one penny more. By definition, experience is the exchange of the errors of youth for those of age.

The only time experience counts for anything is when you’re trying to get some entry level job and meet some arbitrary standard so they’ll talk to you. Once you’ve past that hurdle you can’t by a cup of coffee at Starbucks with ten thousand hours. Those are the rules of this game. Try to learn them (and I’m not saying that with sarcasm. We all have to start somewhere and we all have to learn). This will be my last job but it certainly wasn’t my first or my best. That does not make me smarter than you it just makes me older than you. I know that too.

The FO's got thrown under the bus here...by the company, by the union, and by their peers, i.e. you.

I wasn’t at the bargaining table so I don’t know what exactly happened there and what didn’t. However, I do know all of the people from our side who were there on our behalf, personally. Whatever you may think of them, I know for a fact that not one of them would intentionally throw away the rights of our First Officers on behalf of the captains. I’ve worked with those people for many years and they just would not do that intentionally. You seem to ignore the fact that our negotiators did not agree with the terms of this contract.

I do not know why our MEC decided to put this up for a vote by the membership. That’s a question you have to ask them. All I know is what you know; they decided to remain “neutral” and they put it up for us to decide. We did and now we have to move on.

As for how the “captains” voted as opposed to how the first officers voted, you are making an assumption that I don’t care to make. The truth is you do not know and I do not know who voted what way. The vote is a secret ballot. You say you voted NO and I said I voted YES. I believe you. Maybe you believe me, maybe you don’t. When a tough contract passes there are always a lot of people who claim they voted NO when they actually voted YES. The point is neither one of us actually knows how the other voted.

It is not fair (and more importantly not logical) for you to make the presumption that all captains voted for this and all FO’s voted against it. I happen to know a lot of captains who say they voted NO and every one of them has more than 10 years with this company. I think you’re assuming too much about who got thrown under the bus. Don’t let your emotions govern your thinking.

We went from mid $40K, 60% of CA pay, to low $30K, 55% of CA pay. That is a huge difference when you are at the low end of the earning scale, but I'm sure you remember that, right?

Yes, I do remember that. People like me lost 16% of their base pay, plus a 10% company contribution to our retirement fund, plus all of the same things that you lost. Yes, it’s harder to make it on the lower end of the scale, I know that. Personally I would have preferred to take a 20 – 25% book rate pay cut to keep the 60% FO ratio but I wasn’t given that option. The only option available was yes or no.

Would other captains have been willing to take a bigger hit for the 60%? I don’t know the answer. However I do know that in the past captains did do that. How do you think we got FO pay to be 60% of CA pay? Do you think the company just gave us that? Well, if you do think that let me be the first to tell you that they didn’t. We paid for that 60% ratio by accepting lower CA pay rates across the board. I’m not guessing about that, I was here and I know. You weren’t here and you don’t know.

Continued

 

[surplus1]

Part 2 of 2

The difference, for me, is owning my own house versus an apartment with roommates. How much weight did you give my needs when you voted to put my job at a subsistence wage? Yeah, I'm sure you thought about the FO's, but it really didn't sway you, did it? In the end, it was about saving YOUR job.

You’re wrong my friend. I took all of that into consideration. I thought it would be better for you to have a job with a base rate of $34 than to have no job at all. I also thought it would be better for me to have my new compensation than to be unemployed. I thought it would be better for our mechanics, our CSR, our rampies, our dispatchers and our flight attendants to all have some job, than to be unemployed. I know that the low pay may force many of us to seek employment elsewhere. I thought it would be better to do that while still getting a pay check than from the unemployment line.

I thought that if the company survived and could escape the clutches of Delta we might have the chance to recover and even to grow, in which case, if we did grow you could upgrade sooner and recover more than you’ve lost. I can’t upgrade so I won’t have the chance to recover anything, but you will.

It also occurred to me that you are very young. If you have to it is possible for you to start over and still come out ahead. For a large number of our senior pilots that just isn’t possible, whether they want to or not. Did YOU think about that? Forgive me, but it doesn’t sound like you did. Everything you’ve said sounds like it’s all about YOU. I realize that you are your #1 and you make that pretty clear. You should not be too surprised if others think the same way.

Knowing how sharp you normally are, I have to say I am a little surprised at how badly you botched your analysis of our new rates. You seem to have missed the fact that we all lost a year of longevity with the Feb. LOA. Thus, in making any comparison, a 5 yr guy must look at the new 4 yr pay, 10 at 9, etc. If you do that, you will see that, in every category, we are lower than everybody but Mesa. In fact, the 70 scale is equal to Mesa.

I thought about it but I did not consider it and I do not think it should be considered. The ’05 LOA and this agreement are very different. The LOA was a risk that the pilots chose to take for the prospect of new growth. The benefits of that growth would have gone almost exclusively to FO’s in the form of upgrades. When you are already a senior CA you don’t benefit any from the company buying more airplanes just like the one you already fly. The LOA passed. Do you think that was because all the captains voted against it and all the FO’s voted for it? If that was so then how come it wasn’t voted down? After all it didn’t benefit the captains by a whole lot. Sure some would move from the little RJ to the bigger RJ and make a few more bucks, but the real benefit was upgrades for First Officers. Did you vote NO on that one too? I bet you didn’t.

Did you expect Delta to go Chapter 11 when that was on the table? Was your policy them “full pay to the last day” as you say it should be now now? I wonder.

We voluntarily went from the very top to the very bottom, in the blink of an eye.

In that one sentence is the real difference between you and I. You think this was voluntary. I think it was blackmail under the guise of bankruptcy. There was nothing voluntary about it. And no, I don’t blame Fred for this, I blame Delta Air Lines.

Do you think for a moment that I would vote for anything resembling this POS on a voluntary basis, as in Section 6? If you do you’re way out in left field.

Young man I voted for this for one reason only. Delta Air Lines has a loaded gun and it is pointed at our collective heads. If they have to they WILL pull the trigger. Even though we voted YES, they will still pull the trigger if that is in the best interest of Delta Air Lines. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. It’s not pretty, it’s reality.

We came to this gun fight without the proverbial knife. We came unarmed and we lost. If the gods favor us we will live to fight another day. If they don’t we’re history.
Apparently you prefer to decide to be history and make it happen. I prefer to gamble in hopes I can live to fight another day, when I have a chance of winning. I know that day may never come but I wasn’t ready to guarantee that it wouldn’t.

Fate is the Hunter.

 

[kmox29]

...And this is why the regionals will always race for the bottom or pay to play. Comair got a beautiful contract after a gutsy 90 day walkout. Nowadays, if someone threatens to pull the plug on your airline, we start choking. Comair was one of the first, and they lost. Air Willy was also one of the first and they lost (I believe the promise to them was they HAD the United flying if they took concessions).

Everyone obviously has their opinion. Mine is, I'd rather be out of a job than give in to the threat of "Better fly cheap, or else". I know it won't make a difference if my company (Mesaba) goes under. At least I won't have to work for crap wages in a dead end career anymore.

 

[BluDevAv8r]

Only if you work for a commuter or a 121 legacy carrier.

Well that is sort of implied isn't it? I was referring to the 121 world since this is in a 121 forum (regionals).

-Neal

 

[BluDevAv8r]

MEC chairman J.C. Lawson is also to blame, he couldn't keep Comair mgmt at the table and got the take it or lose it option. Did you know he pulls down 160K a year, never flys, and is out with his ALPA buddies drinking beer on your dime. He buys trips for his Reps that in turn keep him in office. Throw this bum out, he is part of your problem. Oh ya take his side kick Bill "I'll tell you what you want to hear" Baker with him. What has he been doing for the past 3 years besides collecting a paycheck.?

Can you please explain (with facts and evidence) how JC Lawson earns $160,000 per year?

-Neal

 

[N2264J]

Re: Comair Vote Results???

As I said, some may say it is "a day late and a dollar short" but National is making this "pay to play" small jet issue a very important priority.

If you had any compassion for your fellow man, you'd give me some of the drugs you're smoking.

So how's that Brand Scope working out for ya?

 

[BluDevAv8r]

If you had any compassion for your fellow man, you'd give me some of the drugs you're smoking.

So how's that Brand Scope working out for ya?

I suppose I like to look forward rather than look backward...