There Is A Ta!!

[George Jetson]

I've said my peace. I'll bow out now. Good luck.

GJ

 

[liljetdriver]

Hey George, pi$$ off!

If this TA passes it will be the first ratified since jets were on property. You may poo-poo the improvements but they are just that - IMPROVEMENTS. If anyone was expecting us to better Comair post 9-11 they were naive at best. We were up against a parent company with deep pockets who wanted to expand with a brand new senority list and a concessionary contract.

Considering what many other MECs are conceeding these days, at first glance these improvements are very good. I'm a little miffed at 75% DH pay but it is better than 50%. 100% CX pay (tied to completion factor) is better than 0%, and incentive to help the company can't hurt the pilot group once the bitter negotiations are behind us.

I have not yet seen the TA so who knows what the scheduling section looks like, but this is where I believe we were most lacking. However it does say provisions include (trip trade, trip drop, open time procedures and definitive reserve language). Hopefully reserves will again have a life.

Provisions we retained are days off (11R, 12LH), block or better pay, no junior manning.

Yes, considering the size of our pilot group and since we have had jets about 4 years, third place compensation is ok with me. Would I have liked to be the top of the heap, of course. Co-Ex won't be the sole provider of jet feed for Continental forever. Or if you are, what will you have to trade for that privledge? Most likely it will be the same give and take our EC went through to keep all Republic Holdings flying in house on the CHQ pilots master senority list.

But then again I talk to you guys in the vans and most of your 500 hour F/Os claim you will all see 6 figures with your new contract. Guess what, with the size of your senority list you stand a much better chance to better Comair than we did. Talk to me when the ink is dry on your new TA and we'll see who is having the foot sandwich for lunch.

 

[kepjet]

Mr. Jetson,

YOU SUCK!

I've seen your agreement at COEX. "I haven't seen people get their butts kicked that much since someone put a bannana in my pants and let a monkey loose in the room." -Cousin Eddie

As for the pay protection and completion factor, we are already used to doing this figure almost every month so it won't matter. Maybe if your completion factor was higher, you wouldn't try to degrade others. Also, let me know how 2nd and 3rd year FO reserve is in CLE. I know because I have friends there. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.


To all the others,

Don't listen to an armchair quarterback who has nothing better to do than piss on a great day! This sounds like the race to the bottom is coming to an end. Thanks to our EC for all of their hard work. Were we going to get everything we wanted? NO. We earned an agreement which will improve our working conditions and also allow our company to grow. Even at Comair, they didn't get EVERYTHING they wanted. This is a good start though.

 

[StarChecker]

thank christ...

DITTO....I hope recalling all furloughs is among the first orders of business. Nice work to our EC. It feels good being part of the first pilot group to stop taking it up the arse.

 

[100LL... Again!]

Jetson sounds like flamebait to me.

The bigger question is if you are in third place, where were you? If you made it up to third from, say, tenth, then darn good job. To third from second - well...

Nice to see someone holding the line. Jetson needs to chill out a little.

 

[KY_Pilot]

JERKOFF- you should just keep your mouth shut. Nobody needs your negative BS!
And by the way this IS a personal attack-JERKOFF!!

This from a "professional" pilot? I sincerely hope the general public never visits this site. How embarrassing.

And before you flame me, explain to me how management is to view the pilot group with this immature and childish name calling? It's no wonder the pilot group gets no respect.



<shaking head in disgust>

 

[Strikefinder]

I agree that the name calling is inappropriate. The critques of the contract are legitimate, and I expected them, and we all need to hear them. This is the time, now, for discussion about the contract, even with outside parties, because we need to make a decision that all of us can live with for several years.

We will all need to see the contract in its final form before we can make a lot of assessments about its content. However, while criticizing it, it is important to consider our contract both against our competitors as well as against our current work rules.

It is true that there are competitors of ours which retain better clauses in some of these areas than our new TA (apparently) does. The 75% deadhead pay is one such rule. Many of you get 100%, but according to my data, Mesa, Eagle, and PSA, as well as our old contract, paid 50%. We retain no Junior Manning (a very important point to me, at the very least), which many carriers have (CoEx, too, I think?). The 98.5% completion factor thing, again, isn't perfect, but it is a significant improvement over the 0% cx and mx pay that we've earned in the past, and according to our EC, we would have seen this in effect 75% of the past year. Per diem rates are not ComAir's, but they lead Air Whikey's, CoEx, Piedmont, Mesa, Allegheny, PSA, ties Eagle, and is within a nickel of ASA and ACA. I understand quite clearly that United does better on per diem than we do, but I don't personally believe that we can reasonably compare ourselves to United in this instance when our peers uniformly accept this as well.

2nd year pay is up, percentage wise, 22.2%. The pay rates are up considerably, and we have made agreements on wages for larger aircraft which substantially beat the rest of the industry. If we do indeed, as rumored, acquire 70 seat aircraft, we will be in better shape than, say, SkyWest who has accepted a pay freeze on aircraft of this size for the near future. The gap in our pay rates for the smaller aircraft has closed somewhat. We have, apparently, a stock purchase program, improved 401k contributions, Optical Coverage, and improved the language that defines how bases can be opened or closed. In fact, one of the principal things that our EC was working toward was an overall improvement in the wording of the contract, so that there would be less "wiggle room" for the company to take advantage of. They seem confident they have achieved this throughout the training, compensation, displacement, and all other parts of the contract. We've also acquired a commuter clause.

Of course, one of the biggies was to shut down, or at least neuter, the startup and operation of everybody's favorite new alter-ego carrier, Republic, and keep the growth at CHQ. We have achieved this with a "one list" clause in our TA, which would keep all RAH flying at Chautauqua (note that Shuttle America is held by Wexford directly, and not by RAH, so this does not directly affect their flying. Like most of us here at CHQ, we hope nothing but the best for our friends at SA and thank all of them for their support). The fact that we did it with a progressive agreement is a testament to the dedication of our EC and our pilot group's unity as a whole.

That said, even on the surface, it is not going to be a perfect agreement. We all will weigh, over the next week or two, whether we believe that this contract addresses all of our concerns that were brought up by the failure of the last TA, and I, like most of our pilot group, support the outcome either way. If, as a whole, it is determined that the contract does not meet our expectations, no matter my feelings about it I will walk the picket line, if it comes to it, until the last day. However, I think many of us are optimistic that we have made generous strides and that we might be able to finally move forward from the bitterness of the negotiation process.

My mention of other carriers' work rules is not meant as a flame or a criticism of those carriers, their pilots, or their ECs. Please don't misinterpret me. I want to frame to conditions of our TA in the proper context, and more than anything I wanted to point out that comparing any of the regional airlines' contracts to United's will make them pale in comparison. Furthermore, my statements are only based on the information available to me, so if it is inaccurate, I hope that you will [politely] correct me so that we may all have the most useful information to deliberate on our decision. We need to get every viewpoint in the open about this agreement before agreeing to it or denying it, so let's all be civil, even when it's tempting not to be, when someone disagrees with us. (Well, it was worth a shot... )

 

[buzzer]

Jetson may have offended some...but why? There were a couple of personal things in there that one could complain about, but I think it's important that we ALL look at the meat of what he is saying. Look at the time we put into this career and what we get for it. It smacks me in the face when I see some of the stuff thats in our contracts. As a group we don't stand up for ourselves very well. I'm happy for those at CHQ as it looks to be a breath of fresh air for you (please do check the details of the ta though), but as a group, we have allowed ourselves to be used hard. It also amazes me how we joust each other. My dream is that some day we will all stand up together. I think Jetson would be good as a member of a negotiating team.
Those high paying, easy working positions that most of us thought we would have someday are becoming exceedingly rare and most will never see. We need to build this profession up. Ok, I'll step down now.

 

[Cracker]

I agree with all of the positive sentiments above. It's easy to criticize from afar...hell, we all do it from time to time. We won't know the details until we read the TA, but as of right now, it sounds like a big improvement on what we had.

Also, when it comes to retro pay. If we would have ben able to sign within a year of the last agreement, retro pay would have been feesible. But retro pay for the past 2+ years for roughly 500 pilots (at the time) would have buried us. Just do the math. The company got us by the gonads on that one. Retro was a losing battle.

There's probably a good reason that the EC didn't get 100% deadhead, or 100% line garauntee or any of the other complaints. I would like to think that they didn't "settled" on any section of the TA just to move on. There's a good reason for the results. We have to look at the improvement of the TA as a whole not rip it because it isn't exactly like another companies. Sure, I would love to make as much as Comair but our pockets aren't as deep and we realize that.

 

[FmrFreightDog]

Hey CHQ... Congrats!!! From the very little bit I've interacted with you guys out at DFW, you seem like a very fine bunch. I hope your TA is as good as it seems to be, and I'm sure you're EC did all they could. You guys deserve it!!