WSJ: Deregulation finally taking hold after 25 years

[enigma]

shon7, what's up with guys like you and lowcur that refuse to use the quote function of this bbs? It really works well and makes for much less confusion.

Enigma and General-


Enigma, you wrote,"most employers recognize rewarding a loyal employee is the right thing to do." Yes I agree. But my point is that employees who stick around for long periods of time are NOT ESSENTIALLY loyal. There are numerous other factors that are influencing their decision. Jet Blue and some European operators have found a good way around this where they sign on pilots with mutually renewable contracts. That way, ever five years you still have a chance to get rid of the bad apples.

"you still have a chance to get rid of bad apples". Nice attitude. For your information, companies can get rid of bad apples any time they dang well please. My employer has fired quite a few pilots over the last few years. Seniority, and the union that supports it, have no ability to prevent an employer from firing an employee "for cause".

You further state, "

I agree with GL. We work in a 24/7/365 environment.Someone must work Christmas and Thanksgiving, someone must work on SuperBowl weekend, etc. We defend seniority lists because they are what prevents management from giving the best schedule, or the upgrades, to the arse-kissers. “The alternative to Seniority is NOT always Management Assigned.

In the absence of a CB agreement forcing seniority as the means to award bids and jobs, management is ALWAYS in control of assignments. Good management will take care of their people, bad management might not. I would rather work for management who historically treat their people well, (again the reason I pursue SWA), but that is not always possible. Your argument seems to grant that management will always act as a benevolent dictator. I'd work for a benevolent dictator, but if I have to work for an oppressive dictator, I want the protection of union seniority. It may be the lesser of two evils, but it is the LESSER. If you want to work for an oppresive dictator and trust his good will for you quality of life, go ahead; I prefer to have some protection that I control, even if that protection is based upon something as arbitrary as my date of birth.

As far as scheduling goes -- airlines like Virgin use a system of rotating seniority for bidding so that nobody hogs the good trips. Upgrades -- here I will agree with your statement that the CHANCE to upgrade should be given out in order of length AND QUALITY of service to the airline. The classic argument to this will be, "how do you measure an intangible like QUALITY?" My response -- one of the ways is that you go back to everyday situations at an airline (delays, catering screwups, irate/unruly customers) and see what initiatives (if any) the pilots and other employee groups took to retain their client base and ensure the success of the airline. LUV is touted as an example where pilots help out with cleaning the aircraft and throwing bags if need be -- those are the kinds of people we should look to retain and promote because people like THEM will ensure the success of the airline. There was a book out a while back called, "Moments of Truth" by the head of SAS. That is exactly what each moment of client contact at an airline or in any service business comes down to.

Nice try, but there are many methods other than upgrades/pay/schedules for a company, utilizing unionized seniority controlled employees, to encourage and reward employees who go the extra mile for the company and it's customers.

Finally, you mention Emirates and Qatar in the context of unfair upgrades. I suggest that you not compare your airline to Emirates and Qatar. There are some things that they do right and many things that they do wrong. You and especially management should concentrate on what they are getting right.





If you re-read my earlier post I wrote,"Find an alternate to the SENIORITY system. Because it gives every startup an advantage in terms of costs (even if they match the existing payscales). “This is the first and foremost reason one needs to look at alternatives. Otherwise, you will have new startups that have a cost advantage EACH TIME. How to you propose to address this problem while retaining the current seniority system? Can't set a minimum wage for pilots at upstarts because that will keep going down (as we will see with Virgin America), can't base it on supply and demand (again wages will continue to spiral downwards). In addition, it won't be long before startups come up with the idea of "rostering." Again, for some this might seem farfetched but ALL it takes is (for a startup) to put in a clause in the employment contract and sign these renewable contracts with each employee for a period of X years. (Won’t do much for morale but then that has never been a management agenda).

Say what?

General you write, "As far as leaving for another company and starting over, that pretty much is called "life." It may not happen at the top corporate level, like Airline CEO's moving around to other CEO jobs, but if you are a doctor or lawyer and you stop your practice in a certain town to move to a new one, often you have to start over looking for new patients or clients." Doctors and Lawyers and Managers move all the time but not at the extreme level you are looking at. In those professions a lateral move does not mean that you start from the bottom up EACH TIME. Yes, if you stop your practice and move to a new town it might -- but NOT if you just switch companies/firms/hospitals. With the airlines this is not possible. Because of SENIORITY. You start with a new airline -- you start at the bottom. Even as a Direct Entry Captain -- you start at the very bottom of the payscale (for that position).





Finally, the SUBWAY story. I alluded to that because of this childish portion or your response or maybe your attempt at humor in your first post. But I'm glad you referred to it because International passengers being served MUFFINS on an International Flight isn't going to help DAL in any way. Even if it was just ONE flight -- I can guarantee that the passengers on that flight will take that experience with them and remember it for a long time to come -- IN A BAD WAY. If the brightest idea the employees could come up with was muffins -- that's ok. But from what I heard there was no effort by the FAs and the pilots to go to each passenger and speak with them about the situation and apologize for the same (this is secondhand information so don't quote me on this). A possible attitude could have been "I have put in XX years at this airline and put up with management fiascos 1,2,3,... so I shouldn't have to deal with this..." Again, these would be loyal (read SENIOR) employees (Int. route on DAL -- most probably a senior capt. and senior FA's) but didn't do much to try and retain the clients. But hey, on the bright side, at least someone took the initiative.

Management screws up, and now your going to slap around a few unfortunate flight crews because they couldn't just squat and produce food for first class. Man, or woman, you're absolutely unreal!

shon7, your missing one thing. Management also loves seniority. That's the difference between labor and management. Labor is happy to have it one way, we want seniority to afford us protection and are willing to put up with the negatives to get the protections; management hates seniority because it's a union function, yet they want it because it keeps their training/turnover costs at a reasonable level.

Somewhere in this string, someone alluded to the benefit to a pilot if pilots were able to jump jobs without starting at the bottom. Look at what Delta just went through, management threatened to shut er down because too many pilots were doing just that.

Finally, you management guys need to get your act together. Did you ever hear about removing the plank from your own eye before trying to remove the splinter from my eye?

enigma

btw, I HATE reserve.

 

[ivauir]

Shon,

I worked is a system like you describe and I HATED IT. Sooner or later such a system devolves into politics and butt-kissing. And then your job "creeps" - what was stellar performace yesterday becomes expected today (cleaning the jet). The next thing you know in order to get upgraded you'll be driving the lav truck and loading bags. Pilots are mostly hard charging motivated type - A personalities, a senority list protects us from ourselvs.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind doing extra - I do it all the time, but I want it to stay "extra". Keeping upgrade and other bennies non competetive (senority based) enables me to focus on the task at hand and not worry about how I stack up against anyone else. Frankly it makes me a better pilot.

 

[Publishers]

senority

The discussion here reflects the difficulty and sophistication of the problems that management deals with.
Let's look at an example from a different situation and perspective.

At another business a good deal of time ago, I had an excellent telephone receptionist whose only job was to greet visitors and route calls. Let's say she was being paid $5.00 per hour. She had no ambition or talent to do any of the other jobs in the business.

Every year she recieved pay increases based on merit and time of service. Eventually however, she was receiving more than on a weekly basis than we could get the job done for on a satisfactory basis.

You then have to look at a couple of things. What do you do? We can quit giving her merit or time raises, of course, that will make her unhappy. We can try and move her to some other job at the pay level she is in even though she does not want to go or additional respsonsibility. Or, we can just replace her.

None of these are good choices.

In a union situation we would have had to keep uping her pay based on the time in service regardless of the above facts.

What actually happened was we had to slow down her raises, she generally got less interested, started poisoning the culture by constantly taking others time to complain, and, ultimately let her go.

The job was not a $10 an hour job, it was a $5.00 whether you had been there one year or twenty, great or average.

A 747 captain is a $ job, whether you have been there 10 or 20 years.

 

[General Lee]

Why don't we all turn Communist? Yeah, that's the ticket. We'll let the proleteriot run our lives and determine what is fair. Yeah. We'll tell people what they can and can't do, and then offer upgrades to people who show us the most "love." That sounds fair. Please notice that all of the people who think the seniority system should go are NOT current airline pilots.



Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[enigma]

In a union situation we would have had to keep uping her pay based on the time in service regardless of the above facts.

Bovine Scat, pure BS. Why do you management apologists always insist that a union forces pay raises on you? You know that it's not true. Every so often, usually four years, contracts are open for renegotiation. If you don't like pay scales increasing for longevity, then don't agree to the contract. You guys are perfectly willing to draw the line on any important issue; I don't see this any differently, if you don't like it, don't agree to it.

A 747 captain is a $ job, whether you have been there 10 or 20 years.

agreed

enigma

 

[Publishers]

Enigma

The point was missed. I was not saying the union would have forced the raises but that a contract would. The problem here is that the receptionist was making a career from a job that was not a career.

The point is that there would not have been resolution under a labor contract. I would have been stuck in a situation which had a poor future.

Your point is that management negotiates it. That is true. The problem is that everything in these situations is done for the majority and often does not deal with the individual situation.

The earlier posts have pointed out some good and some bad points from a senority based system. The discussion of the resulting spread in pay for equivilant jobs allowing new carriers to thrive is legitimate.

I hoped by using he example that it would be pointed out how you can end up downstream a few years with high cost employees that are less productive.

 

[General Lee]

Publishers and Shon7,


Gordon Bethune was recently quoted saying that anyone could make money in this business if they could start over every 5 years with a new employee group and have new airplanes with little or no maintenance issues. Would you like to try that also? Let's keep everyone's pay down, except management's of course! You guys fail to recognize that many management decisions have really hurt these airlines, and the result is LABOR really paying for their(management) mistakes. How about more managemet oversight?



Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[hellas]

Simple: Wal-Mart=Southwest JB etc..= Volume up and margins and pricing down= $ ....The Pilots were just an obstacle in this process.

 

[Publishers]

General

General,

I am not defending management. They have not done a good job at many carriers and they have faced a host of problems that would have required some creative and intelligent decisions.

That said, everyone suffers in this type of environment. You mention the comments by GB. Singapore Airlines actually used to do a practice like that. They would turn over aircraft prior to any serious maintenance expenses, used contract crews, and went where the money was schedule wise.

The point, if there is one, is that management is not out here trying to screw labor. The labor casulties are victims of the fall out of other battles. The other fact is that labor never really made the transition to a deregulated situation. Unions work great in a regulated environment, airlines or automobiles, businesses where the entry cost and regulation protect you from new entry that is easy. Nevertheless, when competition does show up, you can end up sucking really hard on the pipe. In airlines though we have kept out foreign competition which offers some protection-- and you cannot really outsource airlines to another country.

If you could, heh, this game would be over for anything that even looked like a legacy carrier.

 

[General Lee]

Unions seem to work ok over at Southwest. The difference is that their management and unions know how to work with each other, and the other one isn't out to $crew the other. It would be great to live in your "perfect world", but in reality it AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN.


The unions or union (in our case) will eventually work with management, but it seems like that may happen in court, and the management will be new---appointed by the creditors. Some of those management guys should have taken Management/Labor Relations classes at Wharton.....


Bye Bye--General Lee