$1M less retirement at SWA than UA/DL
01-10-2023, 02:08 PM
#21
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Nov 2022
Posts: 195
Honestly I applaud Lew trying to get the word out. I really do, though I don’t think it will work. Too fractured of a pilot group to get through to enough people to make a difference. SWAPA actually needs just a leader willing to burn the place to the ground. I like Casey but he is still too nice most of the time. He is still trying to play politics and not enough time being the big bad bulldog. A vote of no confidence should have been put in motion on Dec 26 and done in a huge press event. We had ****ed off crew and ****ed off passengers that week, perfect time to have a vote of no confidence go through. Follow that up with daily pressers talking about the continuing problems with WN management. Then a SAV sometime in Spring when the next screw up occurs. Full pressure all the time and when they are on the ground step on their throat and choke them out.
Damage the brand and things will change. Or let them damage the brand and stop helping to fix stuff, things will also change.
01-10-2023, 02:40 PM
#22
New Hire
Joined APC: Oct 2010
Posts: 4
$66,000 is the max the employer can put in. Employee $22,500 plus over 50 catch up. Plus $13,000 backdoor Roth on top.
That number can’t change no matter who you work for. What CAN and should change is the contribution % so you can max out quicker so you can get the excess in cash.
That number can’t change no matter who you work for. What CAN and should change is the contribution % so you can max out quicker so you can get the excess in cash.
01-10-2023, 05:26 PM
#24
Gets Weekends Off
Thread Starter
Joined APC: Feb 2018
Posts: 1,264
I try, seriously I do. I get the same hemming and hawing. One guy got all upset saying this place is better than his previous job at MESA so he is happy right where we are. That went sideways.
Honestly I applaud Lew trying to get the word out. I really do, though I don’t think it will work. Too fractured of a pilot group to get through to enough people to make a difference. SWAPA actually needs just a leader willing to burn the place to the ground. I like Casey but he is still too nice most of the time. He is still trying to play politics and not enough time being the big bad bulldog. A vote of no confidence should have been put in motion on Dec 26 and done in a huge press event. We had ****ed off crew and ****ed off passengers that week, perfect time to have a vote of no confidence go through. Follow that up with daily pressers talking about the continuing problems with WN management. Then a SAV sometime in Spring when the next screw up occurs. Full pressure all the time and when they are on the ground step on their throat and choke them out.
Damage the brand and things will change. Or let them damage the brand and stop helping to fix stuff, things will also change.
Honestly I applaud Lew trying to get the word out. I really do, though I don’t think it will work. Too fractured of a pilot group to get through to enough people to make a difference. SWAPA actually needs just a leader willing to burn the place to the ground. I like Casey but he is still too nice most of the time. He is still trying to play politics and not enough time being the big bad bulldog. A vote of no confidence should have been put in motion on Dec 26 and done in a huge press event. We had ****ed off crew and ****ed off passengers that week, perfect time to have a vote of no confidence go through. Follow that up with daily pressers talking about the continuing problems with WN management. Then a SAV sometime in Spring when the next screw up occurs. Full pressure all the time and when they are on the ground step on their throat and choke them out.
Damage the brand and things will change. Or let them damage the brand and stop helping to fix stuff, things will also change.
It boggles my mind that seemingly 99%+ of career professional airline pilots in our pilot group will spend countless hours researching the ins and outs of the BGE, Mazda Miatas, corporate DEI policy, and red dot sights for their 9mm, but will not spend anywhere close to the same amount of time learning about the factors that directly impact their lifetime earning potential and quality of life for both themselves and their families.
But the clear truth is they simply don't take the time nor spend the energy. They prefer to be spoon-fed the same old myths from people who have done as little research as they have. And so the cycle will likely continue: lagging contract after lagging contract after lagging contract.
And along with our lagging contracts, our "exceptional" way of life will carry on deteriorating: work yourself to exhaustion flying 4- and 5-leg days in the guppy flying more block hours and longer duty days than nearly any other group of airline pilots, spending about half of your shorter and shorter overnights in generally sh**ty hotels, and "only" picking up a couple of extra two-days per month, all so that you can brag to your OAL buddies how your W-2 is slightly bigger than some of their W-2's, while hoping that you don't go out on disability and get tossed to the curb by the company that luvs you.
Real RLA education should have started in early 2017. It hasn't started yet. Mediation should have been filed at least a year earlier than it was filed. A SAV should have been conducted in early 2022. It hasn't been conducted yet. All the steps you listed should have been accomplished (except the SAV should have happened in early 2022 vs Spring 2023).
100% agree with your assessment of Casey. He has wasted, perhaps irretrievably, too much time *****-footing around trying to manage the company for the company instead of executing a forceful organized labor strategy that will yield an industry-leading contract. Remember, he has a lot of "SWAPA 1.0" DNA in him. I think that DNA is clearly expressing itself in the many wasted opportunities he has allowed to come to nothing.
I started listening to the YouTube video SWAPA just put out ("Your SWAPA Execs Discuss SAV, Pickets, and What's to Come.") It was painful and cringe-inducing. I had to stop listening after the 8:50 mark, though, when Casey explained, "...our pilots are extremely educated." That's just obviously false. I want to be charitable, but him saying that is the product of being deeply out of touch, wishful thinking, or worse.
For SWAPA to have bungled the RLA steps this much so far and to claim that "our pilots are extremely educated," I have to suspect that they don't even really understand the RLA themselves. They don't seem to have wrapped their minds around the idea that the most effective weapon that labor has access to is the credible threat of a strike. Instead, they seem to think that pickets and trying to teach the company how to run scheduling are more effective approaches than what nearly 100 years of RLA history have taught us. How novel. What a good idea.
Last edited by Lewbronski; 01-10-2023 at 05:37 PM.
01-10-2023, 06:55 PM
#25
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Apr 2013
Posts: 3,668
My understanding is that Delta's AIP is proposing 18% for their B-Fund after two years. We will have to significantly beat that if our retirement is going to come close to competing with the value of a DL or UA (or even AA) pilot's retirement fund after a typical 30-year career trajectory at one of those places versus a typical career trajectory at SWA. Not only can a pilot at one of the other Big 4 airlines upgrade more quickly, but they also will typically go on to fly wide bodies.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON, besides the tired old rationalization, "Because that's the way it has always been done in this industry," that we have to limit ourselves to basing our contractual demands to the confines of narrow body pilots. There is no law that says we have to do it that way.
In fact, in 2012, a judge from the Eastern District of New York shot down the argument made by the US Airlines Pilots Association (USAPA) that a proposal from management was unreasonable because it didn't conform to industry standards: "USAPA argues that defendants' proposal is unreasonable because it does not conform to industry standards as USAPA defines them. In order to assess this contention, the court would be forced to assess the substantive proposals of each party and to weigh their reasonableness. Doing so would take the court beyond the permissible scope of a bad faith bargaining inquiry" (US Airlines Pilots Ass'n v. US Airways, Inc., 859 F. Supp. 2d 283).
Not only was the court not interested in "industry standards" in the context of assessing bad faith bargaining but it realized getting involved in the discussion of what is "industry standard" and what is not was outside of its authority. It didn't find the company in violation of the requirement to "exert every reasonable effort to make and maintain agreements" because it proposed something that was outside the bounds of the union's conception of "industry standards." Neither would SWAPA be found to be in violation of the RLA, despite what people like TD and CK might assert, if SWAPA demanded the best career compensation package, narrow body or wide body, in the entire airline industry.
The only party that is binding us to the idea that we must limit ourselves to strictly narrow body contract comparisons because that's what we think is "industry standard" is ourselves. We have bought into the self-limiting conceptualization that the only "reasonable" way to approach contract negotiations is through the prism of metrics lke other narrow body pilots' compensation structure and narrow body revenue per seat mile figures. The company luvs us for that.
In 2023, economic power resides on the side of pilots. There are not enough pilots willing to fill in as scabs in the current environment to provide the company with the comforting notion that they could break a pilot's strike with replacements. And, after the Great Christmas Meltdown of 2022, the company absolutely does not want to present our customers with another airline shutdown scenario any time again in the next several years. Right now, pilots, and especially SWA pilots, have unprecedented economic leverage if they wield it correctly.
In a 1988 RLA case, referencing a Supreme Court decision, one federal district court judge put it this way: "the labor laws allow economic strength ultimately to control the establishment of contract terms, regardless of which side may have better reasons for its position" (Independent Federation of Flight Attendants v. TWA, 682 F.Supp. 1003).
Regardless of how "reasonable" or outside the guardrails of perceived "industry standards" the company thinks it might be, SWA pilots have the economic power to demand and receive not just the industry-leading narrow body contract, but the industry-leading contract, period. Now is not the time to settle (again) for less than we deserve and less than we can achieve.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON, besides the tired old rationalization, "Because that's the way it has always been done in this industry," that we have to limit ourselves to basing our contractual demands to the confines of narrow body pilots. There is no law that says we have to do it that way.
In fact, in 2012, a judge from the Eastern District of New York shot down the argument made by the US Airlines Pilots Association (USAPA) that a proposal from management was unreasonable because it didn't conform to industry standards: "USAPA argues that defendants' proposal is unreasonable because it does not conform to industry standards as USAPA defines them. In order to assess this contention, the court would be forced to assess the substantive proposals of each party and to weigh their reasonableness. Doing so would take the court beyond the permissible scope of a bad faith bargaining inquiry" (US Airlines Pilots Ass'n v. US Airways, Inc., 859 F. Supp. 2d 283).
Not only was the court not interested in "industry standards" in the context of assessing bad faith bargaining but it realized getting involved in the discussion of what is "industry standard" and what is not was outside of its authority. It didn't find the company in violation of the requirement to "exert every reasonable effort to make and maintain agreements" because it proposed something that was outside the bounds of the union's conception of "industry standards." Neither would SWAPA be found to be in violation of the RLA, despite what people like TD and CK might assert, if SWAPA demanded the best career compensation package, narrow body or wide body, in the entire airline industry.
The only party that is binding us to the idea that we must limit ourselves to strictly narrow body contract comparisons because that's what we think is "industry standard" is ourselves. We have bought into the self-limiting conceptualization that the only "reasonable" way to approach contract negotiations is through the prism of metrics lke other narrow body pilots' compensation structure and narrow body revenue per seat mile figures. The company luvs us for that.
In 2023, economic power resides on the side of pilots. There are not enough pilots willing to fill in as scabs in the current environment to provide the company with the comforting notion that they could break a pilot's strike with replacements. And, after the Great Christmas Meltdown of 2022, the company absolutely does not want to present our customers with another airline shutdown scenario any time again in the next several years. Right now, pilots, and especially SWA pilots, have unprecedented economic leverage if they wield it correctly.
In a 1988 RLA case, referencing a Supreme Court decision, one federal district court judge put it this way: "the labor laws allow economic strength ultimately to control the establishment of contract terms, regardless of which side may have better reasons for its position" (Independent Federation of Flight Attendants v. TWA, 682 F.Supp. 1003).
Regardless of how "reasonable" or outside the guardrails of perceived "industry standards" the company thinks it might be, SWA pilots have the economic power to demand and receive not just the industry-leading narrow body contract, but the industry-leading contract, period. Now is not the time to settle (again) for less than we deserve and less than we can achieve.
01-10-2023, 07:26 PM
#26
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Sep 2019
Posts: 312
$66,000 is the max the employer can put in. Employee $22,500 plus over 50 catch up. Plus $13,000 backdoor Roth on top.
That number can’t change no matter who you work for. What CAN and should change is the contribution % so you can max out quicker so you can get the excess in cash.
That number can’t change no matter who you work for. What CAN and should change is the contribution % so you can max out quicker so you can get the excess in cash.
United continues contributing past the above mentioned number but into an active healthcare and further into a healthcare retirement account (VEBA). This allows your money to go in tax free and grow and be withdrawn tax free when in retirement. The “active” pays your medical premiums and (via a spending account debit card) out of pocket healthcare costs right now. Better in my opinion than having the excess paid out and taxed as normal wages.
01-10-2023, 07:36 PM
#27
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Oct 2015
Position: Gear slinger
Posts: 2,963
United continues contributing past the above mentioned number but into an active healthcare and further into a healthcare retirement account (VEBA). This allows your money to go in tax free and grow and be withdrawn tax free when in retirement. The “active” pays your medical premiums and (via a spending account debit card) out of pocket healthcare costs right now. Better in my opinion than having the excess paid out and taxed as normal wages.
It’s better than the DC stopping once someone hits the cap, but personally I’d rather a cash over cap payment to my bank account for me to do what I see fit.
01-11-2023, 01:34 AM
#28
Gets Weekend Reserve
Joined APC: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,776
01-11-2023, 02:37 AM
#29
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Mar 2015
Posts: 1,174
Regarding the retirement contribution, you realize that all the other pilot groups are asking for increases right? So it’s irrelevant if SWA bumps it up to 16% because Delta and others are aiming much higher. SWA will be industry lagging again unless the retirement contribution is increased significantly.
01-12-2023, 04:59 AM
#30
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Feb 2014
Position: 737-Right
Posts: 781
Absolutely the LTD needs to be fixed. I agree with ZAP. This is my line as well.
One doesn't think about LTD til they NEED LTD.
Also the sick pay needs to be harvestable in some form of cash.
Newbies: first red flag is a capt with 1600 firm in their bank. Not a smoking gun, but throw in a smoking jacket(blazer), flag tie and hat.....guilty til proven innocent.
One doesn't think about LTD til they NEED LTD.
Also the sick pay needs to be harvestable in some form of cash.
Newbies: first red flag is a capt with 1600 firm in their bank. Not a smoking gun, but throw in a smoking jacket(blazer), flag tie and hat.....guilty til proven innocent.
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