Q: Management proposed “industry standard” RIGs. What was proposed, and why did we focus on Boarding Pay instead?
Our proposed RIGs used Southwest as a template as they are the top of industry in terms of RIGs. We went back and forth with many economic proposals. The cost is very expensive depending on the RIG. When management proposed industry standard RIGs, they were quite below SWA. Their proposal didn’t include reassignment premium, an increase to 401k, etc. With all the pieces together, there was no way to get the deal into the ballpark.
They did propose what they called industry standard, but when we looked they didn’t pay out that much over our current MPRs. When we proposed our version of RIGs, they were much more costly. They did several pairing optimizer runs to cost out the various options. What we noticed was interesting: the number of layovers increased and the overall hotel cost went down.
What we realized was the layovers were much shorter, in cheaper airport hotels. We had to look at the quality of pairings from optimizer. The optimizer worked to optimize away from RIGs, creating less desirable schedules.
At the end of the day, Flight Attendants believe RIGs should be paid out all the time, but that’s not how RIGs work in practice. RIG cost drives the pairing optimizer, and the optimizer can and likely will change the makeup of the flying in order to optimize away from the RIG. We may think a RIG is the greatest thing, but with our network and everything in place, it might not be ideal how it impacts pairing quality.
When looking at the total picture, we eventually pivoted to boarding pay – because it pays literally on everything, every time at work.
When we ran a duty hour RIG, it optimized almost fully away – very rarely triggered duty hour RIG, but instead built pairings where the RIG never triggers. It’s hard to communicate the amount of time we spent agonizing over different variations of RIGs.
We went over so many different optimizer runs, changed different things, mixed and matched to see what works the best. This was the eventual outcome after a lot of conversation and careful consideration.
In DC, we did not fold on Block or Better or ADG until the end – one of the last things we gave up. We couldn’t justify accepting ADG at such a cost, bringing down pay rates (which touch everything) and sacrificing that for ADG which potentially impacted the entire system in a negative way.
It was a long conversation, a lot of thought and care was taken, it wasn’t just something we decided not to fight for.