There you go, everyone that doesn't agree with you is stupid and naive. Must be nice to be the only one who knows what is right or wrong.
It's all in the perspective. SWA pilots agreeing to sit reserve while on layover would affect me and my pilot group a lot more than Delta's new scope clause. And where I believe DALPA successfully reduced/limited the number of RJs that can fly for Delta, SWAPA might allow the weaken of work rules that international airlines have fought for years to achieve and maintain.
You pontificate about these great moral stands pilots should make for the good of the profession yet is seems to me you've never actually done it yourself.
Well, I'm not going to call you stupid or naive, but in this case you ARE uninformed on what is planned and probably also as to how we do things at Southwest. Again, Jim, we are NOT agreeing to sit reserve on a layover, so you can stop worrying about how it will affect you. We have proposed (not finalized yet)
adding a duty period to a Hawaii trip that happens to be a reserve day. It's not a day we would already be there getting paid to sit on the beach anyway; it's a day that would not be part of the pairing if not for the company wanting a guy there to cover a possible sick call. Put a different way, it would either be a two-day (go there and come back the next day), OR turn it into a three day (go there, have a reserve day, and then return on the third day). Do you really not see the difference? That's a real question, Jim. We're not screwing over a layover; that 48 hours sitting in Hawaii wouldn't
exist on a Southwest pairing otherwise.
You know, there's a lot of things that Waveflyer and I do not agree about; primarily because he's more liberal than I am (or put another way, I'm more conservative about some things than he is). However, this is one thing we're in complete agreement about. And I have to give him props for
not being what the caricature of a liberal is in this case: a guy who wants to get paid for nothing. We both know that Southwest provides the best kind of job security by being efficient and not wasting money, and we all do our part to keep it that way. That's why we always have made a profit, and we never have had a furlough. We work fewer days per month to log the same hours as other carriers. Our rigs ensure that. That's a
good thing.
Other airlines have much longer international layovers (and Hawaii too, I suppose), and perhaps guys like that. However, they don't have our rigs, and aren't getting paid
during those layovers as much as we would be. Our company won't waste that money. If we didn't have our rigs, and the company didn't care if we sat around for 48 hours (just drawing perdiem), then yeah, we'd have some cake layovers in Hawaii too, and we wouldn't allow this embedded reserve thing. But on the other hand, in
that case, what would stop the company from having us do a 48-hour layover in some place you
don't want to be, like the General's favorite small Texas college town? I think I speak for the majority of Southwest pilots who
prefer to work 12 days per month to bank the same hours as another company's narrow-body pilot who has to work 15 or more days per month.
So you really can't say we're "setting a bad example" for the rest of the industry here. Hell, we have these industry-leading rigs that are "an example" that no one else seems to follow. If you just want to use this as a random nonsense thing to slam Southwest on, like General Lee, than knock yourself out. (Hell, he makes his Flight Info name equating having two crews out of a thousand per night laying over in Lubbock, with being the worst job in the world. He's kind of funny that way.) On the other hand, if you want a
legitimate argument, then you'll have to go somewhere else.
Bubba
