Originally Posted by
AerocatS2A
They don't have an hourly rate. They have "incentive pay" which pays an additional percentage of your pay depending on how many hours over the min guarantee (59 for A320/1, 60 for the Boeings) you worked. Unfortunately it's a sliding scale that works out to be less per hour than what you were paid for the initial 59/60 hours. So say you are earning $156K flying the A320, your hourly rate would be $203 / hour (156000 / (13*59)) for the first 59 hours you work. Then incentive pay kicks in. Initially it's paid at 1.25% of the 4 weekly salary per hour and the percentage increases the more hours you do, this works out to be $150 / hour from 60 - 75 hours. As soon as you go into incentive pay you are getting paid less per additional hour than your ordinary pay. You only get back to earning the same per additional hour of work when you hit 100 hours and even then it's not quite the same. An A320 pilot flying 100 hours will achieve 167.5% of their base salary, meaning they've been paid $197 / hour for their "overtime", still less than their nominal hourly rate.
There are a lot of good things about the contract, but incentive pay isn't one of them. A needlessly complex system that would be far better by just paying the nominal hourly rate for each overtime hour worked (a whole chapter of the contract could be replaced by one line).
Imagine a labourer being asked to do some overtime for 75% of their normal hourly rate. They'd laugh at whichever clown proposed that, they'd laugh even harder when told it's "incentive".
I agree that IP is needlessly complicated and it’s cheaper than hiring more pilots however, it’s not quite the rip off as you make out.
As you said, we don’t have an hourly flight rate, because we’re salaried. So you can’t simply create one by dividing the Salary into 60hr flying rosters because the Salary also covers ground time such as Turnarounds, SIM’s, Call etc
Using $156k as the example, Salaries are based on a 40hr working work which would equate to $75/hr but of course that’s a meaningless number outside of payroll because we don’t work a standard 40hr week.
While other Airlines use flight hour rates and MGP, we don’t. So it’s not a fair analogy.