CL300Pilot said:
It seems that since the NJA T/A, some here are ticked because we are not the highest paid any more. Personally, I enjoy it here. Prior to my coming here, the biggest complaint was the bidding system and being gone 6 days at a time with only 3 or 4 days off. Now, if you have to make a cross wind landing, people bi#$h.
You're clueless -- I am gonna guess (based on your clueslessness) that you have been with the company for less than 6 months, so I'll cut you some slack.
The QOL issues, many more of them than the 6/3 you eluded to, have been hashed about for years, not just since the NJA TA.
I'll grant you that true, one of the newer issues is regarding pay. But what you may not have been around for is the fact that we have been continously promised we would always be the best compensated in the industry, so there wasn't much to complain about. Now that NJA has raised the bar it would appear they are backing off that promise, so that's what people are really ticked about.
How about the fact we work 14 hour days on a regular basis and 40 more work days per year than any other frac? How bout the fact we are getting it up the back end in a big way on medical and benies next year. The company is saving boatloads of money on our plan next year and are doing so to the detriment of many families. My 8 year old could have negotiated a better deal than we are getting if they would simply have been willing to keep their expenditures equal to what they paid out this year versus cutting them.
You also fail to mention we are the only frac not paid overtime for holidays and get no hotel or per diem during training if you are DFW based like most of the company is. You also fail to mention that while RH himself is a pretty decent guy, most of management (especially DG) have pretty lowly opinion of the pilot group, even though we are the backbone of the business.
You also fail to mention that the other backbone -- the sales force -- has been screwed too and this has led to a slowdown in the exponential growth we saw before. And look at the numbers -- it wasn't 9/11 -- this slowdown directly coincides with their cutthroat tactics with the sales force, not 9/11. Now we have copier slaesman trying to sell aircraft shares -- we lost some great people in sales.
Do you even want to get me started on upgrades?
All that said, with a Union in place I think Flex could be the best of the best out there. But until then, I'm not sure I would want to keep hanging my hat there.