SWA to speed up Airtran integration.....article

[humveedriver]

Lear70 and PCL128 will never admit they help cost the AirTran pilot group hundreds of millions of dollars and alot of beneficial fences that would have helped blunt some of the seniority list pain. Not only did their actions cost the AirTran pilot group alot of money and QOL, but their actions also caused a DFR lawsuit that could end up costing ALPA tens of millions.

A simple pilot vote on SIA #1 would have been the proper way to poll the AirTran pilots (not having MEC reps try and do some unscientific polling through emails). A pilot vote also would have removed almost all chance of ALPA getting sued for breach of DFR.

Monday was three days ago. There will be no Thursday afternoon quarterbacking.

 

[Kharma Police]

Monday was three days ago. There will be no Thursday afternoon quarterbacking.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

 

[humveedriver]

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The airline industry is rediculously cyclical. It's like a history nightmare.

 

[Lear70]

And the other side will never admit that threatening our jobs to vote on an SLI that they used management to ram down our throats, instead of a Real negotiated SLI or arbitration ruined a lot of our careers and cost us millions. That is the sad truth.

Ran into Max in the airport a while back, he went on and on about the DFR that he's a party to, even though he was on the NC, and even though he knows it's a loser of a lawsuit.

There's a lot of things I could get into about Max and what he will never admit regarding the SLI, but it's really pointless now.

I will say that I have REPEATEDLY said (both on the board and publicly) that I feel badly for what my position (along with several hundred other pilots who came to the MEC meeting that day) on SIA 1 cost not only me, but the pilot group as a whole.

I simply expected (as did everyone else on the AAI side of the partition) the Process Agreement to play out as agreed and go on to arbitration. As for the rest, it's history. Life goes on...

 

[Lear70]

The airline industry is rediculously cyclical. It's like a history nightmare.

The only history of any importance to take from this is:

1. Signed Agreements, no matter WHAT management team is in charge, are worth toilet paper if you can't enforce them.

2. The enforcement of signed agreements, including CBA's, is highly problematic with the RLA governing Airlines.

3. No one is going to watch out for you in this business. Not your buddy, not your union, not your manager, no one. Vote how you need to vote, both politically and professionally, and take care of yourself because the senior eat their young, no one is watching out for the future of aviation, nothing is changing those two facts, and if you don't have a "Plan B" in this career, you need to start working on one yesterday.

That's about it for today's object lesson Boys and Girls. Tune in next week for the importance of getting your Semi-Automatic rifle parts BEFORE a President illegally signs an Executive Order circumventing the 2nd Amendment.

 

[737tanker]

Whoa, whoa, wait a second. They changed your buddy pass system so that if you happen to be sick more than a certain number of days in a year, you lose your buddy passes???

If you are sick just one day a month you lose the Buddy pass for that month in addition to the bonus pass for the month.

Also while Military Leave does make you ineligible for the Buddy Passes under the new program Reservists will still be eligible for Buddy Passes under the Military Appreciation Program. In that program a Reservist will get a Buddy Pass for every monthly drill. If a Reservist can do monthly drill on their days off then they can still get passes under both the new procedure and the Military Appreciation Program.

 

[Dash Power]

I actually like the new system for myself. Buddy passes could be a pain in the rear and non-reving can be too stressful anymore. With the new system you can bank the points indefinitely so passes don't expire and you can transfer your points to your rapid rewards account and travel like a customer. This is big upgrade for my family.

It is to each their own and some will like it and some will not. Just like the old system, and the system before that.

 

[maxblast72]

Ran into Max in the airport a while back, he went on and on about the DFR that he's a party to, even though he was on the NC, and even though he knows it's a loser of a lawsuit.

I never said the DFR lawsuit against ALPA is a loser. After watching our former MEC Vice Chair and fellow MC member walk around the office, talk about how stupid the TWA pilots were, and how they were never going to win their lawsuit, I stopped making predictions about lawsuits (or guaranteeing certain outcomes in arbitration).

 

[PCL_128]

Ironic that SWA hired one of your ALPA heroes to play hardball against labor.

If you'd read some of my previous posts about that individual, you would know that he's certainly not one of my "heroes." He was hired by Pinnacle management years ago to help them bargain against us. He's nothing more than a hired gun with no morals or ethics.

What I find incredibly ironic, though, is that SWA hired the very same guy who, when he was ALPA President, stated openly that it was one of his goals to kill the low cost carriers.

 

[PCL_128]

Lear70 and PCL128 will never admit they help cost the AirTran pilot group hundreds of millions of dollars and alot of beneficial fences that would have helped blunt some of the seniority list pain.

The 85% cost themselves everything. Lear70 and I had nothing to do with it. A lack of pilot group backbone did.

A pilot vote also would have removed almost all chance of ALPA getting sued for breach of DFR.

The attorneys disagreed, and you know that.

 

[Lear70]

The 85% cost themselves everything. Lear70 and I had nothing to do with it. A lack of pilot group backbone did.

In all fairness, PCL, and without getting into it again, a large part of the blame falls with the union leadership at the time (LH) in that they never prepared our pilot group for the kind of fight it would have taken to get to arbitration and then, later, to implement the award.

Would our pilots have stood stronger on it and not buckled and started writing "please staple us" letters if we had? Maybe. Maybe not. We'll never know. But looking back it seems pretty clear that IF the MC was briefing the MEC that threats were being made about non-integration by SWA senior management BEFORE SIA 1, and IF we were going to continue to play the game of brinkmanship we started to play by voting down SIA 1, we should have prepared our pilots, IN ADVANCE, for the kind of lashback that came shortly thereafter in the GK letter.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda, I know, but I'm not going to blame our pilots for our failure of leadership (I know, I wasn't in any position at the time of SIA 1, but I still should have seen past the facade of friendliness sooner). It was a battle I would have liked to have fought. Now it's just time to move on. :beer:

 

[maxblast72]

On September 26, 2010, I was working 20 days a month and making $127.15/hr. With little or no growth, I was looking at another 3-5 years of reserve on top of the 4 years of reserve I had already done. In 2008, I was 7 numbers away from getting bumped back to FO (resulting in a $50-60K paycut). After Jet A bottomed around $1.25/gallon in February 2009, Jet A was running around $2.20/gallon by September 2010 (and reached $3/gallon the following spring). Delta and Northwest had completed their merger pretty smoothly and were starting to hit on all cylinders (which usually meant tough competition for little AirTran). These are the type of arguments SWAPA and Jeff Freund would have been making in arbitration. Gary Kelly was allowed to present at the arbitration hearing and you can bet he would have been supporting something less than DOH as fair.

Let's say we had decided to go to arbitration in the fall of 2011. Gary Kelly probably would have broke the news that the B717s were being subleased to Delta about a week before the arbitration hearings were to start. So we would have been walking into arbitration with 52 B737-700s, orders for another 50, and 1,750 pilots. Do you really think an arbitration panel would have given us a list much better than what we got in negotiations? After reading the other employee groups arbitration awards it is pretty obvious the arbitrators didn't view the airline as equals which pretty much rules out obtaining straight DOH from an arbitration panel.

So we ended up getting DOH minus 2.7 years (on average). So lets say we could have received DOH minus 1 or 2 years in arbitration. Was it worth it to give up $100-200K to get another 500 seniority numbers? Some would say yes while others would say no.

Anyway, it is all over now except for the lawsuit to wind its way through the court system. Should be fun to see how it plays out.

 

[Luv2BFlyin]

In all fairness, PCL, and without getting into it again, a large part of the blame falls with the union leadership at the time (LH) in that they never prepared our pilot group for the kind of fight it would have taken to get to arbitration and then, later, to implement the award.

Would our pilots have stood stronger on it and not buckled and started writing "please staple us" letters if we had? Maybe. Maybe not. We'll never know. But looking back it seems pretty clear that IF the MC was briefing the MEC that threats were being made about non-integration by SWA senior management BEFORE SIA 1, and IF we were going to continue to play the game of brinkmanship we started to play by voting down SIA 1, we should have prepared our pilots, IN ADVANCE, for the kind of lashback that came shortly thereafter in the GK letter.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda, I know, but I'm not going to blame our pilots for our failure of leadership (I know, I wasn't in any position at the time of SIA 1, but I still should have seen past the facade of friendliness sooner). It was a battle I would have liked to have fought. Now it's just time to move on. :beer:

The fact the NC overstepped thier bounds should not be lost on anyone. A good list would not have required all the flimsy C&R's.

For everyone else reading this outside of WN/FL, who'd have wanted to vote on a deal that would have resulted in up to a 32% seniority loss? Would it have even been worth it? It's embarrassing to even explain to those outside the deal. The most common question I get is "why would you ever vote to accept that?" and my only answer is that 87% were afraid of thier jobs based on hearsay and lack of belief in the current law.

The MEC made the right decision in not even bothering with sending out a sub-standard deal. After that, they got weak due to the sh!t storm created by the NC. There is plenty of blame to go around, however, had the NC not over-stepped thier bounds and left Dallas when negotiations moved passed just a "list", we'd be in a much better position than we are now. Regardless of perceived threats, SWAPA communications, etc., I'd have happily tested MB to achieve a fair SLI.

Like everyone else has said, it's over and we're all learning to deal with it, it's just frustrating when an NC rep defends overstepping thier bounds and acting as if others screwed up when they set the ball in motion.

 

[Luv2BFlyin]

double post

 

[humveedriver]

On September 26, 2010, I was working 20 days a month and making $127.15/hr. With little or no growth, I was looking at another 3-5 years of reserve on top of the 4 years of reserve I had already done. In 2008, I was 7 numbers away from getting bumped back to FO (resulting in a $50-60K paycut). After Jet A bottomed around $1.25/gallon in February 2009, Jet A was running around $2.20/gallon by September 2010 (and reached $3/gallon the following spring). Delta and Northwest had completed their merger pretty smoothly and were starting to hit on all cylinders (which usually meant tough competition for little AirTran). These are the type of arguments SWAPA and Jeff Freund would have been making in arbitration. Gary Kelly was allowed to present at the arbitration hearing and you can bet he would have been supporting something less than DOH as fair.

Let's say we had decided to go to arbitration in the fall of 2011. Gary Kelly probably would have broke the news that the B717s were being subleased to Delta about a week before the arbitration hearings were to start. So we would have been walking into arbitration with 52 B73e7-700s, orders for another 50, and 1,750 pilots. Do you really think an arbitration panel would have given us a list much better than what we got in negotiations? After reading the other employee groups arbitration awards it is pretty obvious the arbitrators didn't view the airline as equals which pretty much rules out obtaining straight DOH from an arbitration panel.

So we ended up getting DOH minus 2.7 years (on average). So lets say we could have received DOH minus 1 or 2 years in arbitration. Was it worth it to give up $100-200K to get another 500 seniority numbers? Some would say yes while others would say no.

Anyway, it is all over now except for the lawsuit to wind its way through the court system. Should be fun to see how it plays out.

See, this is it in a nutshell. It's the junior Captains who are senior in age to the younger more senior Captains that's causing all the strife. Throw in our underpaid FO's for good measure and you have this ultimate haves versus have not dysfunctionality. I'm sorry this deal screwed you Max and anyone else who feels screwed by it. If the first deal had passes you would have gotten a temporary pay raise to SWA CA and then been bumped down to FO with the 717 departure. There would still be something to complain about. There always will be.

 

[Luv2BFlyin]

On September 26, 2010, I was working 20 days a month and making $127.15/hr. With little or no growth, I was looking at another 3-5 years of reserve on top of the 4 years of reserve I had already done. In 2008, I was 7 numbers away from getting bumped back to FO (resulting in a $50-60K paycut). After Jet A bottomed around $1.25/gallon in February 2009, Jet A was running around $2.20/gallon by September 2010 (and reached $3/gallon the following spring). Delta and Northwest had completed their merger pretty smoothly and were starting to hit on all cylinders (which usually meant tough competition for little AirTran). These are the type of arguments SWAPA and Jeff Freund would have been making in arbitration. Gary Kelly was allowed to present at the arbitration hearing and you can bet he would have been supporting something less than DOH as fair.

Let's say we had decided to go to arbitration in the fall of 2011. Gary Kelly probably would have broke the news that the B717s were being subleased to Delta about a week before the arbitration hearings were to start. So we would have been walking into arbitration with 52 B737-700s, orders for another 50, and 1,750 pilots. Do you really think an arbitration panel would have given us a list much better than what we got in negotiations? After reading the other employee groups arbitration awards it is pretty obvious the arbitrators didn't view the airline as equals which pretty much rules out obtaining straight DOH from an arbitration panel.

So we ended up getting DOH minus 2.7 years (on average). So lets say we could have received DOH minus 1 or 2 years in arbitration. Was it worth it to give up $100-200K to get another 500 seniority numbers? Some would say yes while others would say no.

Anyway, it is all over now except for the lawsuit to wind its way through the court system. Should be fun to see how it plays out.

If you're claiming the 71's going away as an excuse for your failure, why didn't you speak up when RM from WN mgmt was tounting the 71 staying for the full duration of thier leases during roadshows to promote SLI2? If you knew they were going away early, wouldn't it have been prudent to share that rumor as it was for all the other crap you guys spewed?

 

[SWA/FO]

except for the lawsuit to wind its way through the court system

What lawsuit? Where can I find it?

 

[Kharma Police]

If you'd read some of my previous posts about that individual, you would know that he's certainly not one of my "heroes." He was hired by Pinnacle management years ago to help them bargain against us. He's nothing more than a hired gun with no morals or ethics.

What I find incredibly ironic, though, is that SWA hired the very same guy who, when he was ALPA President, stated openly that it was one of his goals to kill the low cost carriers.

Ha! Ha! A former ALPA officer screwing over "fellow" airline pilots by joining management? Sounds about right. I guess you people will do anything to keep from flying an airplane....

 

[humveedriver]

What lawsuit? Where can I find it?

I'm only aware of this one

http://ia700806.us.archive.org/25/items/gov.uscourts.gand.181455/gov.uscourts.gand.181455.1.0.pdf

 

[humveedriver]

Someone asked about SWA/AT pilots relations. I'll bet anyone a cold shiner, that they are better than some of the AT/AT pilot relations or SWA/SWA pilot relations. Mergers seem to bring out the worst.