Wait. Do I have this right? 76 hours of pay for 52 hours of block?? And your bitchin'??
Because it doesn't come with an increase in days off.
If you were getting paid 84-86 hours with 15 days off and suddenly got reduced to 76 hours of pay with 15 days off, with NO way to get back to the 84-86 you were used to crediting, I bet you a C-note you'd be P.O.'d, too.
That's what has happened over here. Rather than keep the same number of reserves and spread the block hours out with a dramatic increase in days off to go with those reduced block hours, they made the trips horribly inefficient for many lines, even for our ATL guys, with 2-3 legs a day, 2-4 hour sits in airports in the middle of the day, long duty days, and 16 hour overnights everywhere from BWI to CAK to STL and increased the folks on reserve from 30% to close to 42%.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention, you can't trade trips or your pay will snap down to whatever your actual credit is, i.e. you lose your guarantee, so you're stuck with your original line.
The only positive came from an email I sent to Russ M a few weeks ago, asking him if they HAD to increase reserve coverage, to make a large portion of the reserve increases to be Non-Preassigned Long Call Reserve, so at least a few of the high number of ATL commuters could sit reserve from home, thus LCR has gone senior and those people probably won't fly all month, but that's about a dozen guys/gals out of 1,500. MCO didn't see the increase in LCR lines (or I'd have bid it, it went senior to me).
So yeah, if you'd like to volunteer for a 10% pay cut with the same number of days at work, more power to you.
I understand this is the pain that comes with the transition, although the training flow we saw didn't see it constricting this badly until 2nd Qrtr 2013 (it's a result of a large number of closed cities), but there's a lot of things to be aggravated about on this side of the wall. ATLPlt may be right, and many of you may not be able to see it or care, and again it's not an excuse for people to be d*cks to SWA crews (or vice versa), but to think we should still be smiling and high-fiving each other is a ludicrous position to take.
Delta and NWA did it right. This slow death by a thousand cuts is going to create long-term feelings with a lot of people. A belief I expressed to MV and CM a few weeks ago in LA. They know, but they also recognize that our people are professionals and will keep coming to work and doing their job despite the hardships. I may be wrong, but I don't see them changing anything to fix the issues, which is unfortunate, thus people are going to be P.O.'d for the duration. Just my opinion after talking one-on-one with them for a couple hours.
It is what it is. Don't shoot the messenger, I try to be nice to everyone I meet. It's not their fault the integration is being done this way instead of the way DAL/NWA did it.
