Originally Posted by jtrain609  As I said, my fiance's job doesn't travel as well as mine does. She lives in Park City, and the other option is having her drive up a snow covered canyon every day to work and to be honest with you, between the high cost of gas and the chance of her getting in a car accident making that drive, living in PC is what we're faced with. Sure she could leave her job so I could move into base, but that ain't exactly fair for her is it? So I'll work on higher pay, which we need anyways, in my current career.
That person can also lawn dark an RJ pretty easily and take 50 people with them. Is that the person you want flying your wife around? We should have higher standards so not everybody can get into this career.
Ok here's where you've gotta understand something:
Pilots are worth nothing to start.
We are only worth what we can negotiate.
We're not worth what we'll be paid, because if they could an airline would not pay us ANYTHING to do this job. We would work for free, and under that payment convention we're worth nothing because that's what somebody is willing to pay us.
We don't go into contract negotiations with the public, so they don't matter. My contract, and my pay rate, is between me and my company. I am worth whatever I can extract from them. If you don't believe that, you don't understand the bounds of the RLA and the concepts that are present in collective bargaining. A doctor is able to say, "I'm worth X amount, and if you don't pay me that, I'll find somebody that will." We are bound by the RLA and what we, as a group, can manage to extract from the company.
Do you REALLY think an CEO is worth $20 million a year? I mean what do they do? If the CEO were fired, he can be replaced right away. If you fired all the pilots at a company you'd need 8 weeks before you could replace them, and in that period of time the company would disappear.
THAT is where we're worth something. These companies DO NOT OPERATE WITHOUT US, and that was the simple idea that John was trying to tell us with this post. Until you realize that, you'll continue to be used by whatever system you're bound by.
Don't do this job for free because you love it, because you'll realize quickly when you're in the pointy end of a jet that very little of this job is flying. It's hard to fully understand that concept until you're doing it for a living, but it is what it is. Believe me I didn't understand it until I was cruising along at 8,000' over the desert in a Chieftain, sitting on my butt thinking, "I'm not being paid to get this thing from point A to point B, anybody can do that. We're a paid insurance policy for the company to save this airframe when things start failing." |