I thought we were starting on occasions to see to six trips a month on some lines in relatively recent "days of old" under Bidline and Roster assign/FA but I'm probably wrong.
You are not wrong, but I’m not sure I’d call bidline with FA, the days of old. It was a temporary alleviation to the rules. In the same way that a year or so of hanging about for an hour waiting for a bus from the aircraft to the car park prepared us well for the one hour it tends to take to get from chocks on at T5 to the car park, a few years of FA prepared us well for JSS. Quite clever of BA really. 5 trips a month is busy but doable, and is probably a fair price for being junior, but 6 trips a month is a recipe for serious fatigue in my opinion. Bidline used to have a rule where if you had 5 trips but were not at CAP at stage 1, you could drop as many of them as you liked with the hope of getting closer to CAP with the 5 trips you might pick up at stage 2. I presume the intention there was that 6 trips a month was a bit much. I agree that if you set a max 5 trips or adjusted credit for shorter trips, the senior guys would then switch to picking up 5 of the shortest trips and leave junior guys with 5 long trips. Hence why I stated that a seniority system for monthly bidding doesn’t really work very fairly. I’m all for there being some advantage to being senior, but the advantages are way too high.
Introducing some kind of points system for weekends is an attempt to remove the seniority advantage for that element of monthly bidding. Messing about with inhibitors is an attempt to do away with the seniority advantages there also. We seem to be attempting to use a strict seniority system with a load of sticky plasters. It is true that the BALPA members voted for JSS. When 50% of the pilots are more senior than the others, and many of those in the bottom half recognise they will be in the top half by the time the system comes in, funnily enough, it gets voted in - particularly when tied to a paydeal, it doesn’t mean it is a good system for the guys in the bottom portion.
I know plenty of people who are refusing commands purely because they don’t want to give up the huge lifestyle advantages afforded be being senior.