RJDC 6/26 update

[surplus1]

So 40 ASA Captains end up in the right seat for 10 years to "make room" for pilots who decided to leave ASA? How is that fair?

Fins,

You and I are on the same side (I think) but please, don't think that any part of this equation is about what is "fair".

I'm not familair with the displacement provisions of the current ASA contract, so I don't know how your ATR pilots will be reassigned.

However, you do have a seniority section and a filling of vacancies section in your contract. Unless your MEC or your pilot group agrees to J4J, there is no way that anyone can force Delta pilots onto to your "list" ahead of ASA pilots. They can put them on the bottom of your list but they cannot give them "super seniority" without your consent. Your contract is "amendable" but (short of bankruptcy) the status quo remains in place.

Please tell me that your MEC is NOT considering some foolish agreement like the one at PDT/PSA/ALG/CHQ/TSA/MES. Your posts are leading me to suspect that you might be. Tell me that I'm wrong, please.

 

[Palerider957]

Surplus:

J4J has not been been discussed with the ASA pilot group. I can't imagine it would be well received.

 

[General Lee]

Then we would get most of the new 70 seaters and 100 seaters. Dalpa will not give up jobs, and Delta (Grinstein) wants his large pay cuts. Flight Safety won't mind who uses the sims----Delta pays for them anyways. The recalls are set, and the new airplanes I believe will be mostly 100 seaters and some 70 seaters.


Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[Palerider957]

Then we would get most of the new 70 seaters and 100 seaters. Dalpa will not give up jobs, and Delta (Grinstein) wants his large pay cuts. Flight Safety won't mind who uses the sims----Delta pays for them anyways. The recalls are set, and the new airplanes I believe will be mostly 100 seaters and some 70 seaters.


Bye Bye--General Lee

....you can have'em General: enjoy the short-calls, extensions, actually having to WORK and fly trips, 6 leg days, crappy pay, idiot crew schedulers, no work rules....in short, welcome back to the regionals!

For the ASA pilots, we need to have a Viet Cong approach to our currrent contract situation....VICTORY OR DEATH.

 

[BlackCoffee]

General,
I understand you want the new airplanes, but why the 70's. Like you said, people do not like riding on them for too long and your loyal customers would not be happy. The 100 seaters would seem to fit your company better. Would Delta use jetways for the 70? I don't care either way who gets them, but it seems you just don't want ASA or Comair to have anymore airplanes period. Hopefully everything works out for both sides and bk is avoided. Too many families have suffered already due to todays world climate. Good luck to everyone!

 

[General Lee]

Black coffee,

What I see here is 1030 (not 1060---30 came back today) people who have been out of the cockpit for awhile probably. They want to come back. What are the new aircraft that will probably come towards us after we take huge pay cuts? Well, 100 seaters, and some 70 seaters probably. How long do you want these pilots to stay out and wait for only the 100 seaters? This is not my decision, but one that Dalpa may investigate. An option could be J4J--but it seems that most DCI pilots would not want that without a guarantee of seniority on mainline. I do not have the answers here--but I bet Dalpa will be looking into every option. I have flown on the CR7 as a pax---and I think 2 hours onboard is fine--and there are probably many cities within 2 hours of the hubs that could still use some CR7 service--especially without LCC competition.

Palerider,

Do you have a better plan that includes helping the rest of the furloughs? Don't forget about them--I haven't. I know you guys at ASA have helped some by hiring them at the bottom--which was nice. But, what about the rest of them? What should be done?

Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[FurloughedAgain]

Please.

With all due respect.

General Lee is not on his company's negotiating committee.

General Lee is not on his company's MEC.

General Lee does not have Grinstein's ear.

He is no different than we are. A simple line-pilot with an opinion regarding how things should play out. If you were to come to some kind of miraculous agreement tomorrow on Flightinfo.com it would make no difference whatsoever.

An agreement here will not yield a T.A.

An agreement here will not necessarily convince Delta/Comair/ASA management that a merger, staple, preferential hiring scenario, etc. is in their best interests.

The General has the furloughed Delta pilots' best interests at heart. That is quite admirable. Every airline should have a pilot group with as strong, and sincere a conviction regarding their displaced brothers. But they dont.

For every one pilot like General Lee, there are 10... or 100...or 1000 who are far more interested in preserving their own payrates, working conditions, and retirement than protecting the career of their junior brothers.

The phrase "ALPA eats their young" was not borne from airlines entirely staffed by pilots who think like General Lee.

That being said, the General makes two good points that we should take away from this.

#1. The 1030 remaining furloughees should be DALPA's #1 priority. I doubt that it is, but in my mind it should be.

#2. The 70-100 seat airplanes that Delta wants and needs to fly are nothing more than negotiating capital. The Delta pilots can choose to use that negotiating capital however they wish.

They can agree to give it away in order to preserve pay, working conditions, and retirement.

They can agree to keep it (and thereby save their furloughees) and sacrifice the above.

But those airplanes, and in-fact, any ammendment to their existing labor protective provisions (Allegheny/Mohawk LPP, fragmentation, scope exceptions, Song, etc..) are ALL nothing more than another dollar of negotiating capital that DALPA has to decide how to spend.

Personally, I believe that when faced with the threat of bankruptcy they will fall back into the ALPA mold and protect their senior at the expense of their junior -- but then again I have yet to find an ALPA pilot group that strays far from that stereotype.

 

[USCtrojan]

Which is it?

I don't understand once again. Back in 2000, DALPA made it clear that first of all, ASA and Comair were wholly owned subs and completely separate from Mainline delta. In Contract 2000, dalpa made it quite clear that, "if the door hits the ground, we don't wanna fly it." Claiming also that the 70 was not a "Mainline aircraft." Now apparently it is a "mainline aircraft" as it appears you want them. You want the 70's? Fine, give me a seniority number and integrate the lists, as should have been done awhile ago. I'm not an advocator of this but dalpa sure changes its colors fast when their back is against the wall. Sickening. I don't like that there's furloughed pilots at delta, however, you're not going to trade one pilot furlough at the expense of another (ala mainline for wholly owned sub). You're the pilots that did not want to fly with them. And it was a choice your union made over and over again. I'm not an advocator of the RJDC, but I'll tell you what, it's arguments like these that make me for it.

 

[fam62c]

Scope clauses and such

I don't know how this will all turn out in the end, General Lee seems pretty sure he knows what DALPA will or will not do but I'm not so sure. The threat of BK is a very serious threat to a union because once CH 11 sets in you lose a lot of control over what your contract will look like. It's easy to talk tough but in the end you do what you need to do survive and live to fight another day. I don't envy your MEC and Negotiating Committee for what they are about to go through. When you negotiated your contract you had the advantage, now the company has a loaded gun pointed at you and there is nowhere to run. How much bargaining power do you think the UAL pilots have now? It's better to do the deal outside of BK and ALPA will be very clear on that, even if it means accepting some things that you NEVER thought you would. The General is entitled to his opinion as much as anyone on this board but I think that it's oversimplifying the problem to just assume that "we will give back some money and everything will be allright." Think AirTran, or maybe worse, JetBlue with a 100 seat RJ; that's what your cost structure will need to look like to be competitive in the short-haul market. The ugly truth is that you guys could take 90% pay cuts and your costs would still be too high to operate a 100 seater competitively because it goes way beyond just pay rates. It's corporate structue, fleet complexity, employee longevity, pension costs, work rule costs, training costs, facilites, and the list goes on and on. Dal's costs are higher in every area than the short-haul specialists and some of that is simply unavoidable. It's fine to say that "DAL can operate as many airplanes as they want of any type as long as they fly them at DAL" but the people who say this might think again if they really understood what their contract would look like to make this possible. You would need pay rates BELOW your competition because a big airline with multiple fleet types will always be inherently more expensive to run. My guess is that DALPA will do all they can to retain the best pay and work rules possible under the circumstances for the larger equipment that can bear the costs better on long-haul, super high-density and international routes. The trade off will be allowing unlimited 70 and possibly 100 seat AC at connection carriers or a new, totally separate division that will look like a discount carrier in every way. A lot of pilots will probably be surplussed from DAL due to necessary streamlining and productivity improvements.

As far as J4J is concerned, I think that it sets a terrible precedent because it violates seniority, which is one of the cornerstones of any union contract. I don't think that ANY pilot likes to see other pilots out of work and I don't think anybody is suggesting that available jobs shouldn't be offered to furloughed DAL pilots, however, they should start at the bottom of the list. What if things were reversed? What if Comair was downsizing and furloughing and DAL was expanding and hiring? Would DAL pilots want the furloughed Comair pilots to take CA positions on DAL growth aircraft? My guess is that this idea would never fly, however, I don't think anyone would object to the furloughees being hired in at the bottom of the list. I hope that the Delta Connection locals don't go the way of the USAirways groups and perpetuate the gutting of the seniority system.

I understand the theory behind scope clauses but I don't think they are really working. I think they are costing jobs instead of protecting them. If there were no airlines such as Southwest, Airtran, JetBlue, Frontier, Spirit, ATA etc. maybe scope clause would have the intended effect but that's not how it is today. The bottom line today is that if airlines want to make money they will need to match the proper sized aircraft to the correct routes and those aircraft will need to operated at cost levels appropriate to the available revenue. 100 seat small jets are going to be a big part of the short-haul transportation system one way or another. Any mechanism that prevents this from happening is doomed to failure. In theory scope clauses may "protect the profession" by attempting to prevent the transfer of work to smaller aircraft operated by pilots with lower wages and benefits but in practice they can't invalidate economic reality: the best contract in the world with the best pay and benefits is of no value if the company ceases to exist. The fact is that if an airline can't make a profit all of it's employees will eventually be out of work and the union contracts will be nothing but worthless pieces of paper.

 

[General Lee]

Just look at ALPA's history. They will not just give up jobs, they will fight to keep them thru J4J or a scheme like MDA---that happened at USAir and United recently. At the same time, Dalpa is making sure that we get creditors together and try to come up with solutions. The only way, according to Grinstein, for this to work is to "earn our way out"---and that won't be with as many 50 seat or maybe even 70 seat jets with the low fares out there. You are right that the costs have to come down---but Delta is not exactly like Southwest and the rest--we do have a profitable INTL area--and that combined with a better utilized domestic operation can yeild results. Everyone has their own opinions--that is correct.


Bye Bye--General Lee