read the article....you'll love the rebuttal
A Sacred Cow in the Cockpit
By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, March 21, 2008; D01
The airlines are in one of their funks again. The price of jet fuel is skyrocketing, a softening economy is beginning to cut into demand and executives are warning of yet another round of losses and layoffs.
It remains something of a mystery why this industry, almost uniquely, can't figure out a way to charge enough to cover its costs, hedge against spikes in input prices, and remain flexible enough to accommodate the inevitable ups and downs of the economy without reflexively running to the government or bankruptcy court for relief.
One argument the industry makes is that there is still too much capacity, despite the fact that every flight you go on these days seems to be filled or nearly so and fares have risen noticeably in recent years. To the degree there is overcapacity, one suspects it has more to do with the perverse ways in which the major carriers compete, by creating networks of feeder flights that lose money and hubs that make money only if they so dominate the traffic going in and out of major cities that they can drive competitors from the market.
But there is no getting around the fact that the airlines also suffer from unions that, 30 years on, still haven't fully accepted the reality of a deregulated marketplace where the interests of consumers come before those of employees. There's no better proof of that than the apparent collapse of the merger of Northwest and Delta because of the inability of their pilots unions to find some way to combine their seniority lists.
By tradition, and union contract, seniority is sacred for airline pilots. It decides who gets to be a captain and who a copilot and who gets to fly which planes -- the key determinants of pay. And seniority is the main factor in establishing which city pilots are based in, which routes they fly, when they get to take vacations and which ones are laid off when times are tough.
No surprise then, that when airlines merge and try to consolidate the pilot seniority lists, there can be lots of disruption. Some pilots tell of being bumped back to copilot, suffering a $100,000 drop in income. Others tell of the indignity of having to fly a boring old 737 from Chicago to Orlando after several years of glory commanding a 747 back and forth to London. And imagine how it must feel, after 20 years in the business and several rounds of forced "givebacks," suddenly to be required to work on Christmas or Thanksgiving because a new colleague from what was once another airline has been flying longer than you.
You might think that given the generous pay top pilots earn relative to the number of days they work, and given the precarious financial nature of the industry, pilots would be willing to show some flexibility to assure the long-term success of their companies. You might think that would be especially true in the case of Delta and Northwest, which have offered pilots a nice raise, an ownership stake and a seat on the board of directors if the merger goes through.
But you'd be wrong.
Or perhaps you might think that members of the same national union could negotiate in good faith with each other, with the help of experienced and impartial mediators, to come up with a fair method of combining seniority lists.
Wrong again.
The top Northwest pilots tend to have more seniority than the top Delta pilots because so many senior Delta pilots took a buyout offer before Delta's recent bankruptcy filing. The next senior Delta pilots, who are now flying the big planes and the best routes years before they expected to, are determined not to lose seniority to their more experienced Northwest counterparts.
Meanwhile, some of the junior Northwest pilots, looking ahead, have noticed that when a big group of their senior colleagues retire in five years, they might not be able to move into coveted routes because a big group of Delta pilots have more tenure.
Mediators have proposed any number creative ways to combine seniority lists while minimizing some of these dislocations and disappointments. Since Northwest and Delta don't fly all the same planes, for example, separate seniority lists could be maintained for the most desirable 747s and 777s.
And there are ways to assure pilots flying certain routes that they can't be bumped even by someone with more seniority. In cases where one carrier's pilots tend to be older and more senior, you could agree to "feather" the seniority lists so that the combined list starts with the most senior Northwest pilot, followed by one or two of the most senior Delta pilots, followed by the next most senior Northwest pilot, and so on.
But after months of closed-door talks, no combination of these ideas has proven acceptable to either group.
None of this should come as a surprise. Nearly two years after the supposed merger of US Airways and American West, the two are being run largely as separate operations because the pilots cannot agree on how to combine their seniority lists. Not only are the unions fighting in court, but some US Airways pilots have filed a petition to oust the Air Line Pilots Association as their official union after it backed a compromise plan hammered out by an arbitrator.
The basic problem here isn't just the selfishness and shortsightedness of airline pilots. The problem is with seniority itself, and how it forces airlines to operate in ways that are irrational or unproductive.
Think about it. If pilots and copilots have the same training, and all that distinguishes them is that one has 10 years of service with the same company and the other 15, then by what logic should one be paid $100,000 more than the other?
Or, for that matter, why should tenure be the primary determinant of which pilots get ahead rather than, say, measurable differences in flying skills, ability to deal with customers and colleagues, and demonstrations of commitment to the company? That's the way it is done at most companies in most industries.
While we're at it, what's wrong with mixing things up a bit so that every pilot gets to fly at least some of the more desirable routes or some of the more desirable planes for which he or she is qualified, regardless of seniority? Surely there's a way to design schedules so more junior pilots don't have to work on every holiday while senior pilots work on none.
The reason it's so hard for airlines to find a fair and rational way to combine pilot seniority lists is there is nothing fair and rational in the way seniority is used. It causes a disconnect between performance and reward, discourages movement of employees between and within companies, creates a corrosive caste system that breeds resentment among junior employees and an overblown sense of entitlement among those who are most senior.
Airline customers, employees and shareholders would all be better off if the industry spent less time and energy figuring out how to combine seniority lists and more time on how to eliminate them.
Steven Pearlstein can be reached atpearlsteins@washpost.com
I commend the pilot who wrote the editorial back to the journalist...he/she did a GREAT job and a much needed service to the industry.Re: A Sacred Cow in the Cockpit '=
By Steven Pearlstein -- Washington Post
Friday, March 21, 2008; Page D01
Dear Mr. Pearlstein,
In your March 21 article, "A Sacred Cow in the Cockpit", you highlighted the airlines' pilot seniority system, along with unions and "the selfishness and shortsightedness of airline pilots" as being the source of the airlines' ills.
I too find fault in the seniority system for this reason: the seniority system is a trap, impeding a pilot's ability to market his skills to the highest bidding airline.
In 1980, after earning my way through college as a commercial diver, competing three years as a varsity college athlete, and graduation with honors in aeronautics, my hard work, commitment, and sacrifice were rewarded with acceptance into a Navy pilot officer training program.
If I worked hard and successfully completed Aviation Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, I would earn the opportunity to work hard, sacrifice, and commit to Navy flight training. Of my initial class of thirty-three officer candidates, only thirteen of us completed this initial program. The other two thirds, all selected college graduates, washed out before the hard work of flight training had even begun.
The next year and a half were similar, in that my hard work, sacrifice, and commitment led ultimately to graduating Navy jet pilot training at the top of my class. Additionally, there was now risk. The risk of failure - many other very capable pilot trainees washed out, and the physical risk that could cost a young pilot his life.
Earning my wings at the top of my class gained me the privilege of another full year of hard work, sacrifice, commitment, and risk. This time, as a Fleet Replacement Pilot, learning to fly and fight the F-14A "Tomcat".
As before, the weeding out process continued, with the first two of several squadron mates lost in a fatal accident, and the ongoing performance standards to meet, with the final cut being based on successful night-time aircraft carrier landing qualification.
The next five years of active duty service to my country were characterized again by, you guessed it, hard work, sacrifice, and commitment, and a substantial amount of risk which claimed the lives of several more squadron mates. Are you beginning to see a theme yet?
In 1987, after serving seven years as a Navy carrier based fighter pilot, I competed against many other highly qualified applicants to attain a position on the bottom of Delta's pilot seniority list. At that time, Delta Air Lines was sought after by many aspiring professional pilots, due to its long tradition of strong management, financial stability, harmonious labor relations, and top of the industry compensation.
The subsequent twenty years of my career as a Delta pilot are where the aforementioned strategies of hard work, sacrifice, commitment, and risk were no longer rewarded. We in the profession became the target of airline managers constantly seeking to diminish our hard earned standard of living, while greatly boosting their own wealth.
A compliant business press aided these executives in their effort to deflect attention from their own inability to successfully manage our airline, by dutifully scapegoated pilots.
This is where you come in. Those of us in the piloting profession long enough to have been through several business cycles have seen the same business press misrepresentations recycled several times now.
These biased journalistic efforts typically contain phrases such as yours: "the selfishness and shortsightedness of airline pilots", even though the seniority system ensures pilots interests are in the long term health of his or her company. These same pilots have seen a parade of turnstile executives cycle through, taking their plunder with them in the form of early vestment in special executive retirement plans, severance packages, and other forms of featherbedding.
Another business press straw man is the spoiled pilot, who works only a few days per month. The dishonest omission, as you probably know, is the length of a pilot's work day, and his total hours of paid time which is always less than actual in uniform on-duty time.
An airline pilot's on-duty time frequently exceeds twelve hours, and more recently, goes well over sixteen hours, due to the advent longer range international flying. A pilot is not paid for preflight preparation time, or time spent in between flights while connecting to the next leg of flying during his duty day. This doesn't even take into account the amount of time a pilot spends away from home, as his working days off-duty time is spent living in a hotel room.
In your article, you assert that one would think that "given the precarious financial nature of the industry, pilots would be willing to show some flexibility to assure the long-term success of their companies." You failed to point out that Delta pilots lost their defined benefit pension plan, and nearly half of their pay, during Delta's recent trip through bankruptcy.
Would you or your readers care to show such flexibility?
I believe that your misrepresentations cause harm to the airline industry by deflecting attention from other, very serious structural and management issues, which aids in their perpetuation.
These issues include skyrocketing jet fuel prices, skyrocketing medical insurance benefit costs, a lack of pricing power in order to cover these skyrocketing costs , and a disconnect between executive compensation and a company's long term financial performance.
In fact, it is ironic that you mention "a disconnect between performance and reward" in reference to the pilot seniority system, without noting what is in the recent memory of nearly every Delta pilot. That is the gang of short-term executives, led by Leo Mullin, who briefly passed through Delta, and then left for greener pastures with their lavish unearned retirements safely in hand, as Delta approached the bankruptcy that cost these pilots their pensions and standard of living.
The bias you employ in playing to your target audience is a disservice to professional pilots, who now find that, contrary to the long held promise of America, their hard work, sacrifice, commitment, and risk are no longer rewarded. They deserve better. And you, and the traveling public, should hope that enough reward remains in the airline pilot profession to draw the quality of people needed to ensure that your every flight continues to operate at the high level of safety which you currently take for granted.
For my part, I have conceded that, in a time in which leaders at the very top of our political and corporate culture are not held accountable for their failures, near term change is not likely.
At the age of fifty, without enough remaining working years as an airline pilot to rebuild a retirement, I quit Delta, in order start over by running my own business. Finally, after twenty years, my hard work, sacrifice, commitment, and risk are again being rewarded.
