So if a National Seniority List is a pipe dream…

[spiffomatic]

Capitalism depends on te free flow of labor between companies. Right now- every major in the world is using seniority and our weakness against us. They know 2 things: we will cut off our left nut to avoid starting over at the 'bottom' AND that this generation of senior pilots is a bunch of selfish entitled pu$$ies who wouldn't think of sticking up for anyone but themselves.

The two solutions to this are a national seniority list- or doing what the poster here said- GET RID OF 1st year payscales. It's an awful tradition. And it hurts everyone - if the senior won't sacrifice for it- the FOs ought to- simply combine years 1-5 and get your next raise at year 6. 1st year pay is a big reason mgmt knows we will never walk away. Thus decreasing our leverage for everyone.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not suggesting a windfall for year one people or a flattened payrate. I'm talking about - at a minimum, making year one liveable so any of us, if faced with the necessity of a change, can make it happen without selling the farm.

Airbum, you're right about some of the payscales out there... The Legacies tend to have a less extreme distribution of pay - some of the LCCs and Regionals have pretty large swings of 100% or more - probably because they look good on paper to the pilot group when it comes down to a vote, despite the max rates being unobtainable to all but a few. Those are the rates that could afford to look a little more like the Legacy scales.

The interesting thing is, especially at companies with top-heavy lists, the cost of doing this for the pilot group, by the pilot group would be minimal. Think of it this way... When American (for example, and these are not real figures, but I hope you get my gist) finally starts hiring again, let's say they hire 500 people in a year, or less than 5% of the pilot group. How many CA's and FO's are at the top payscale... just about everyone? If you took a simple assumption of no money lost or gained by the pilot group overall, and 5000 CAs and 5000 FOs at year 12 on the payscale, one single dollar off of that year 12 pay rate would equal $20 added to year one. I know it's not that simple in a real world scenario, but the point is that it's hard to talk about redistributing wealth or giving a windfall to the junior guys when they - your coworkers, or you in the future - make poverty wages the first year. It's not about paying dues - that's a stupid argument. That's like kicking your younger brother because your older brother kicked you once. We don't have to do the payscale this way but we have - and this leaves the senior guys S.O.L. if they need to move on after the company they helped build for the past 20 years suddenly succumbs, TWA-style, Pan Am style or in the classy implosion of any other once-great Legacy of the past.

The age 65 jab I made in the other post was meant to be harmless. It really has nothing to do with fixing a broke system.

 

[livin'thesim]

The guys at the top staying over 65 should give something to the guys whose careers are being sacrificed.

They should 'take on for the team' like they are always demanding. Well, lots of guys at the bottom have taken plenty for the team already.

But they only take, they never give, that's baby boomers for you.

 

[Ty Webb]

News flash- Pilot Pay really has very little impact on the bottom line. Pay at the top does not need to be lowered, bring the rest UP. Why would you advocate lowering pay rates that have already been sliced in half? A 737 costs about $5K an hour to operate. If the flight crew is at $150./hr for CA and $90./hr for FO, then that cost is about $240./hr + another 40% for FICA, retirement and other taxes. . . . $350./hr out of $5,000. or 7% of the cost of operating that aircraft. You could give both pilots a 25% raise, and only increase your total costs by $88. or 1.7%. The problem isn't pilot pay. You're operating a $30 million dollar piece of equipment, with a liability of probably $1 Billion in the event of a crash. Why do you guys all have such low self-esteem? Let them fly the planes if they don't want to pay. . . . That would be amusing to watch, but hard to clean up after.

 

[waveflyer]

Spiff- it's a solid idea- keep posting it here- let everyone you fly with know what you think- how low wages anywhere affect us all. But most importantly, write all the unions. Writing here is one small thing. There are much larger things that are more effective. You have my support.

Most men and women here that have taken HUGE paycuts or furloughs or extended stagnation at regionals have never thought about their situation deep enough to truly know what happened to them and why.

Bottom line EVERYONE in the industry benefits with the abolition of "first year pay"- including the very senior. Try getting a group to agree to 50% paycuts when better managed airlines pay a livable wage from the beginning and have a better future.

 

[maru657]

Well, Since anything else is called socialism, you just make yourself available to fly at any company with labor problems. If a national seniority list is wrong, why should you support the seniority list of any other airline? If "JoeBlow" alrlines is doing well at the moment and the standard human condition of myophia persists, and it will, at some point in the future "JoeBlow's" management will figure out how to make the balance sheets look even better on the backs of their unionized labor, ie; pilots, at that point, surely they will be open to "off the street pilots" willing to work for just a little less in order to pay bills. It may be a race to the bottom but you didn't start it.

 

[spiffomatic]

Ty,

Fine. Raise everyone's pay. That's great and I agree we could all head that direction. That's not my point though, and it's a different issue all together. There's an economics term called ceteris paribus - meaning "all other things being equal". I'm saying that taking the issue of pay distribution only (all other things being equal) and killing the idea of probationary first year pay would enable us to treat each other a lot more like the professionals we are, and make dealing with an adverse company situation much more viable.

What do you think the outside world thinks of professional pilots when they hear we often make (amongst other miserable pay) something in the range of $20-$30k first year. That's pretty embarassing, and I don't think it does our reputation any good. And it probably turns away a lot of otherwise good people. If a company balks at it and says they have to recoup training costs, maybe tie much stronger first year pay to a first year pro-rated training contract. Maybe not - but one way or another, fix first year pay, and maybe we begin to dig ourselves out of this post-deregulation hole we're all in.

The irony of this first year pay problem is that if a company stagnates (doesn't hire for over a year), first year pay becomes a moot point and doesn't affect the company or the pilot group since noone's even on it. In that case, you could probably make the argument that raising that payrate should affect other pay even less. But when hiring kicks in, I think it places that pilot group at an advantage.


Maru, I don't even know what you're trying to say, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with anything.

 

[waveflyer]

This isn't about individual companies. It's about the leverage gained when, as an industry, we know that leaving our current job for the next job won't bankrupt us.