Originally Posted by tsquare

Are you seriously saying that it is OUR fault that none of the other carriers achieved appreciably more than us? Really? WE hamstrung THEM??????? Good Lord I thought I heard it all. NOBODY has done anything of note. Nobody. And that is our fault.

Originally Posted by tsquare

Set goals, make statements... yada yada yada. I want action, not talk.

Originally Posted by tsquare

The newbies are getting 15% retirement and they don't have to do a damned thing other than breathe. That is better than you and I will ever have done. To say that I don't care is ludicrous. But I cannot worry about a newhire that won't retire for 30 years that already has a projection far better than mine...

Originally Posted by shiznit

What about with a just a little more green, not much.... I still think we will do better if we are unified, but this is academic anyway...


sorry for the blue box... it doesn't highlight anything

I don't know about y'all, but I'm crediting a lot more than 1000 hours per year, and I am not working more. Add in some contract items where it adds hours like training/vaca/CBT and 5:15 ADG hasn't kicked in yet, and now the number gets bigger outside of the rate.

Originally Posted by DAL 88 Driver

We have been in the leadership position in our industry. And we've set the tone and pretty well established that restoration is not the goal.

Originally Posted by DAL 88 Driver

"We have an incredible track record working with our colleagues at ALPA. And if you just look at the track record over the last 10 years, it's been just phenomenal and we expect it to continue to be that way. So if you look at what we've been doing in the business, we've really taken the labor risk totally off the table at Delta."

Any guesses as to whom that quote is attributable?

So, do any of you think C2015 is going to achieve anything even remotely resembling restoration with essentially the same strategy we've been using for the past 10 years, i.e. "labor risk totally off the table?"

Originally Posted by shiznit

To me, that looks like a nice chunk of leverage when we threaten to take the labor peace off the table...

Don't want to burn that leverage too early or it becomes an empty threat that won't have an effect on the enterprise/stock price (I.e. APA's last 12 years), before C2012 almost all our peers were well behind us (roughly 14.5% average below) the company was still pretty deep in debt, and we were still only marginally profitable. Going to torches and pitchforks then would not have yielded a result. By gaining an additional 12.84% it broke the mold considerably.

Playing "nice" and jumping to a 25-30% lead was smart, IMO. That helped UAL make 25-40% gains and AMR to have to pull and renegotiate a better Ch11 contract. Now that we have UAL edging ahead us in 2016, AMR set to average off of us and UAL in 2016(the rest of their contract is in bad shape though), LCC gone, a company with a much lower debt structure and massively more profitable we stand to get the level of compensation you and I both think we deserve (I want the QOL too!)

Playing nice last time gave mgt a talking point, and them saying that to the investment community just gave us a bigger hammer. I don't think Donatelli and Morgado are afraid to use it.

Will the pilot group rally behind them and give them the big nail of pilot unity as the other necessary leverage point? I'm going to do my part, I hope you will too.

Originally Posted by Carl Spackler

So did you. So did Moak. Rj's are good for Delta pilots...don't you remember that Sailingfun?

Originally Posted by sailingfun

Not once have I ever posted or thought the E170/175 should be at DCI. I have been 100 percent consistent in my posts on that issue. It's a mainline aircraft. Malone also brought us LOA 46. That was the biggest give back in the history of Delta airlines and we were not in chapter 11. The forum has talked over and over about what a huge mistake that was yet they seem to forget it was Malones baby.

Originally Posted by DAL 88 Driver

LM's "proactive engagement" (I would say "proactive appeasement" is more like it) has certainly kept labor peace at Delta... but it's also set expectations that restoration or anything even remotely close to restoration is off the table. Management has every reason to believe that the "pilot cost dragon" has been slayed once and for all, never to be revisited.

Would JM have made this mistake? Who knows? But my gut instinct is he would not have.

Originally Posted by Carl Spackler

The E170/175 is an RJ. Moak has publicly stated and written that RJ's are good for Delta pilots. You have dutifully agreed with Moak on this. In fact, I can't recall you ever disagree with anything Moak published.

It's disingenous (at best) for you to criticize Malone for something that you made the case for.

Carl

Originally Posted by alfaromeo

There is no difference in our goals; we all want the same thing, more money, more time off, more benefits, the whole package. Despite the lame webboard arguments to the contrary, there is not one pilot involved in negotiating our contract that does benefit from all those things. Their interests are directly aligned, they have no reason to accept anything less than the maximum available amount of money. Any argument to the contrary is just made up crap.

The only difference is the path to get there. You believe in the emotional side of the argument. Your idea is that the only thing we lack is the will to get the job done. If you create these emotional propaganda based arguments like executive compensation, you can generate massive contractual gains through sheer will of effort. For you, any contractual shortfalls are merely a lack of concentration and effort. So you create these emotional arguments based on what we made a decade ago, or what management is making, or you use conflated statistics to try to get your way.

An example is your claim that pay banding will cost 1,000 jobs. In order to save 1,000 jobs, you would have to have at least 1,000 pilots in training per month, meaning that every pilot on the seniority list would have to go through training each year. If you assume that pay banding would save half the training slots, an aggressive assumption, you would be saying that Delta manages 24,000 training events per year, or each pilot goes through upgrade school every 6 months. If that argument were brought forth to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of our careers, you will be laughed out of the room. Same as your claim that $86,000 per year compensation increase is nothing.

My view is simple. Our contract will be based on economics. That is how the company views it and more importantly that is how the NMB views it. They talk about the zone of reasonableness and what they mean is use economics to justify your position,not emotion. Emotionalism gets you parked for years and years. There is a reason I can't buy a new Mercedes for $100 and a reason why I can't buy an apartment in Manhattan for $1,000. It is all economics. No matter how much emotional propaganda I spit out, I can't close a deal on those terms.

On that chart above, I asked you to look at all the zeros on the left side of the chart. That is the result of pilot groups negotiating from emotion and not economics. History has shown that my way of looking at things has succeeded where others failed using your way. I know that many believe that if they just use the emotional method but just become more emotional, then it will work. It doesn't. The rest of the piloting industry has come to the Delta way of thinking. Look at how the APA is now dealing with their JCBA. No threats to meet them at the fiery gates of hell, just an economic analysis of the state of their company and the state of their contract in relation to the rest of the industry. This is the path to success.

I know the big joke is about the time value of money, but it is not a joke. Look below at how hard it is to catch up if you blow two years of negotiating. Even I could make a touchdown in the NFL if they put me at the one yard line and put the defense back at the 50.

Originally Posted by sailingfun

So what was a DC-9? The 170/175 is not a RJ. I have always stated it belongs at the mainline period.