Mesa TA...Part Duece!

[surreal1221]

Or when the NMB is not meeting until early next year, refusing to take on ANY grievance work until that point as well.

It must be great to have friends in high places. It's time we have OUR friends in high places.

Spira, when did the contract become amendable? Did the company and the Association meet prior to the amendable date?

Just wondering how long you guys have been hasing things out.

 

[SpiraMirabilis]

We're only on month 11 of negotiations right now, which is why a lot of people are leery of the TA.

 

[kellwolf]

Ok so I am ignorant..... elaborate please?

No oversight on PBS basically means management can change things on the back end of the program, and you'd never know until you got the crappy line awards. One HUGE thing would be the ability to bid for training. The way it works for us right now, is we're assigned training for recurrent, upgrade, etc. The way PBS handles it is the training goes in first, then it builds a line AROUND that. Vacation is even worse. If you've got vacation at the end of the month, it's possible you'll get hammered the first half of the month with few days off.

 

[OldTownPilot]

No oversight on PBS basically means management can change things on the back end of the program, and you'd never know until you got the crappy line awards. One HUGE thing would be the ability to bid for training. The way it works for us right now, is we're assigned training for recurrent, upgrade, etc. The way PBS handles it is the training goes in first, then it builds a line AROUND that. Vacation is even worse. If you've got vacation at the end of the month, it's possible you'll get hammered the first half of the month with few days off.

That sounds EXACTLY like the CAL Preferential Bull ####.

The old man gets a vacation, has to work the day before it and the day after it. Under hard lines you could get 7 days off in a row just on the line. You had to be a total hack to not have 14 days off with a one week vacation. That is unless you wanted to still have a 85 hour line, and had your vacation days on the 7 days that your line had off anyways.

There are so many ways to screw with crap in the background to royally screw things up for the pilots.

 

[surreal1221]

We're only on month 11 of negotiations right now, which is why a lot of people are leery of the TA.

Yeah, understandable. . .but realize too that you don't want to be one of these companies that takes 5+ years to negotiate a damn contract. :banghead:

 

[inside0ut]

Pffttt... Using PBS at your company and actually bid for VAC?

That's what sick calls are for.

It makes no sense under PBS to bid for it when it looks at a day of VAC as 2.5 hours. Put a week in there and you get taken down to min days off even with the vac. Its ridiculous when you bid 2 weeks off and look at your schedule and see that you have 19 days off when you normally hold 17... doesn't make sense.

 

[derg]

Ok so I am ignorant..... elaborate please?

Basically, PBS can work in favor strictly of the bidder, or strictly in favor of crew scheduling.

They can continuously run PBS until they get the results they're looking for, which may or not be consistent with what a majority of the pilots were looking for.

Having PBS oversight means that there's someone there to say, "Nope, run it again" until a result consistent with what people desired is balanced with staffing needs.

PBS can be a useful tool or it can be your worst nightmare if you don't have any quality control and oversight.

 

[kellwolf]

Pffttt... Using PBS at your company and actually bid for VAC?

That's what sick calls are for.

It makes no sense under PBS to bid for it when it looks at a day of VAC as 2.5 hours. Put a week in there and you get taken down to min days off even with the vac. Its ridiculous when you bid 2 weeks off and look at your schedule and see that you have 19 days off when you normally hold 17... doesn't make sense.

The way we do it, is we bid for vacation in Nov, so we know when we'll have it. When that month rolls around, if you want the money, you tell PBS you want off on the days you're scheduled vacation. That way, you're getting paid 3.75 hours for some of your off days. If you want time off, bid for days off that aren't under your vacation.

The problem is, the system is setup to award flying, so if you're looking for days off, odds are it'll conveniently (not for the pilot, though) not be able to build a line for you with those days off. See, management can put a floor into PBS, and they can change that floor from month to month. They tell the system to fly pilots at LEAST this much but not more than this. Before the slow down it was something insane like 85 for the floor and 96 hours for the ceiling. Now, pretty much everyone is getting guarantee, yet days off are way down.