Airhoss

“We” didn’t almost do anything in regards to the Tumi TA “We” shot it down in flames. “We” stopped an incompetent and sold out MEC in its tracks and got rid of the vermin. Then “we” fixed the issue which brings us to our current UPA.

A little reality and common sense goes a long way.

hummingbear

Let’s be clearer about that history. In the early days of TUMI there was a lot more justification than we like to remember. “This is the best we can do”, & “a bird in the hand” type stuff. Whether it was on the road to passage I’m sure I can’t say, but it was far from immediate outrage. It was a couple weeks later when AA management came out with their “UAL plus” offer that people started to realize how management friendly TUMI really was; leading the union & company to begin renegotiating the terms. During this time, DAL came out with their undeniably superior contract, setting a new bar & completely changing the negotiating landscape. By the time we “shot it down in flames”, the company was already promising to offer us “Delta plus”, so there would have been no logical reason to have voted yes on TUMI. The vote was more a matter of policy than anything else.

I still think we did the right thing by recalling our reps, and I 100% believe this contract is vastly better than TUMI. We built a better union & grew into a more responsible labor group in the process.

But DAL absolutely did the heavy lifting on this. We came out with crap, they set the bar, we followed suit. Yes, we definitely did some cleaning of our own house, but congratulating ourselves as industry leaders is a bridge too far, in my opinion.

jerryleber

I can. It was NEVER going to pass. Over time the majority NO vote simply grew an overwhelming NO vote.


United pilots' overwhelming NO vote was announced on 11/1/22 the day after the Delta strike vote announcement. https://www.alpa.org/news-and-events...0profitability

The Delta pilots announced their AIP a month later in early Dec 2022.
https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-...ith-its-pilots .

FangsF15

Both things can be true.

Much like the DL pilots did back in 2015 with our "TA 1", the UA pilots rose up from the grassroots level, and recognized that the "Tumi TA" was a piece of hot garbage. And much like the DL pilots, the UA pilots cleaned house and started over. The fact UA pilots turned down the "Tumi TA" is a genuine credit to the vast majority of the UA pilots who had enough, and said "NO!" Both pilot groups (DL & UA) had the stones in their own timelines to stand up for a better contract, and won bigly.

However, the fact UA (and AA) pilots got the contract you just did is mostly due to the work of DL Pilots, and most specifically the out-effing-stading negotiating team at DALPA. In Nov 22, UALPA was in the process of matching AA's substandard second attempt a contract at 10/5/5 and 6 months of retro. When DALPA announced a deal at the end of Nov 22, UALPA actually withdrew their table position as it was lower than what DALPA had just secured at 18/5/4/4 with 3 years of retro (potential sore subject for some, at 4/4/14), and a truckload of other major improvements. Improvements which UALPA and APA basically copied wholesale, with customization as appropriate. Notably, UALPA raised the bar from DL on pay 2% - a genuine thank you and full credit for that (which I understand is a result of the Covid-era 5% "profitability raise" at UA).

So full credit to UA pilots for turning down the Tumi TA in thier own right. Truly. But also credit to the work DL pilots did, starting in 2015, and again in 2022. And thank heavens APA tripped all over themselves, taking 3.5 attempts to not hamstring us both with an abomination of a contract.

jerryleber

What two things? I was merely pointing out that hummingbear's timeline of events is incorrect.

DALPA did a great job, but so did Ed Bastion when he violated the mediator's gag order.

hummingbear

Thanks for the correction. M
It’s been a long time, my memory is far from encyclopedic, & it’s not my intention to misrepresent. Neither you nor I know for a fact what would have happened in the absence of the AA offer, but the real backlash to TUMI didn’t start until then. There was plenty of talk about “strangling the golden goose” up to that point which if you don’t remember, you may be looking back through the lens of everything that’s happened since then. It simply wasn’t as unpopular then as it grew to be.

And yes, when the no vote happened, our management was explicitly promising a better offer, so as much as we celebrated ourselves at the time for that resounding rejection, it was more of a formality to return us to the bargaining table than anything else.

So it was after we resumed negotiations that the DAL contract came out. (Mea culpa) However, the big gains from this TA largely meet the bar DAL set at that time. To put it another way, I don’t really see anything in this contract that DAL will have to “catch up to” in their next round, but we were essentially catching up to DAL on everything with our contract. That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of hard work that went into it, I just think it would behoove us to recognize who really paved the road we drove in on.

jerryleber

Correlation is not causation. The Tumi would have failed big with or without Robert Isom's BS maneuver.

And of course the Delta contract set the standard and led the pattern. Everybody recognizes that. They did a great job and we were all fortunate that their CEO violated the NMB's gag order. As the old heads say, leverage shows up and we need to be ready to take advantage of it. The Big 3 pilot groups did just that.

FangsF15

Okay fair enough. I thought you were disputing more than simply the order of two things.

However, your understanding of the effect of Ed’s CNBC Strike comments is overblown. First, there was no gag order beyond the standard NMB rules on disclosure of specifics, and that was not violated, as far as that goes. And second, when Ed made those comments, the entire contract was complete except 4 open items. The final session was already scheduled with the principals scheduled to attend, including the company President, CFO, and COO in attendance. While it’s true the mediator didn’t appreciate Ed’s comments, and as a result asked for mgmt’s best offer, the prior offer was already well in excess of what was on the table elsewhere. It had an effect, of course, primarily that it brought negotiations to a conclusion. It’s not like we suddenly got some massive windfall far above what our negotiators had already won.

PNWFlyer

yeah, I’m not scared of COVID. I got it when it wasn’t cool anymore. When I got it every single person I came in contact with that day (all of them vaccinated) got it. My point was people saying the vaccine doesn’t work. Well, it would work if we had a vaccination rate over 95%. Well, we don’t we never will. So, people with CoMoreBigTitties (pronounced co-morbidities) are at risk of dying if they get it. Hey, F them if they can’t take a joke.

FangsF15

Am I understanding you right? Do you actually believe that Covid would go away if 95% of people got vaccinated?