Be very careful cherry picking data points! You might be willing to take the Delta pay, but are you willing to accept the layoffs too?
NEW YORK (CNNmoney) - The Air Line Pilots Association filed a grievance Thursday challenging Delta Air Lines' decision to furlough 1,700 pilots as part of the airlines' plans to cut staff by about 13,000 jobs.
"Our contract has a no-furlough clause that covers all pilots on the seniority list on July 1, 2001," said a statement from Capt. William Buergey, chairman of the union's Delta unit. "Nearly all of the pilots targeted for layoff are protected by that provision."
A representative of Delta, the nation's No. 3 airline, said that management believes the grievance is without merit.
2001 article Delta pilots fight job cuts Union seeks to block furloughs of 1,700 pilots at nation's No. 3 airline.
It won't take very many google searches to see the US industry moves from boom to bust and back to boom. The big increases come with much higher probabilities of layoffs when the industry tanks. The industry relations between management and pilots could be described as a knock-down, bare knuckle, no holes barred brawl.
To wit
Hero pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who safely splash landed a US Airways jet into the Hudson River last month, said today that he had his pay and benefits slashed over the past few years.
In his testimony before a House aviation subcommittee in Washington, Sullenberger said that his pay had been cut a whopping 40 percent and that his pension had been slashed and replaced with a promise “worth pennies on the dollar” from the federally-created Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
It was those cuts — followed by a wave of airline bankruptcies after the 9/11 terror attacks and the current recession — that hurt how much pilots are currently paid.
“The bankruptcies were used to by some as a fishing expedition to get what they could not get in normal times,” Sullenberger said of the cash-strapped airline industry.
“I do not know a single, professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps,” he added.
NY Times:
SULLY TOOK BIG PAY CUT By
Clemente Lisi February 24, 2009
The founder of one of the largest hedge funds (160 billion under management), Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates came out this week, describing the COVID-19 virus as likely a one in one hundred year event. He is an avid student of history & debt cycles, and is up there in the elite of returns, so he has a point of view worth considering.
Additionally, it seems to me that this is one of those once in 100 years catastrophic events that annihilates those who provide insurance against it and those who don’t take insurance to protect themselves against it because they treat it as the exposed bet that they can take because it virtually never happens.
My Thoughts About the Coronavirus Published on March 4, 2020
I would be extremely surprised if Qantas did not have buyers remorse about what they are about to offer.
What is going to be on the table soon is an insurance policy. Have the odds shifted in favour of the pilots to bet the farm on a single vote? That is the question everyone needs to ask themselves.
Between now and the beginning of the vote opening we are all likely to get a much better insight into the validity of Dalio's assessment of the severity of this virus. This could potentially cripple Aviation for a very long time. It took a decade in the US before the industry recovered after 9/11.