Pilots days of being fat, dumb and happy are over. Company needs to go after reserve, holding FC seats for rest, bistro vs. full meals in the cockpit, self-issued A3 travel (you know it is abused), VC overlap with trip, time between promotion, etc.
The company already did some of these things with the latest contract:
*Reserves are now available 19 days per month instead of 18, also, the old simple proffer/pass system has been done away with for a system based on low GTD, which levels out the flying among reserves in a bid status and prevents senior pilots from passing excessively and prevents junior pilots from being timed out before the end of the month.
*Under the old contract, pilots received 2 adjoining F or J seats for rest, today, the company can sell that extra seat or give it to an AAdvantage member as an upgrade for miles (the pilots still gets the adjoining seat if the cabin is not full).
*VC overlapping with trips has been rectified by going to a 3:15 per day vacation bank system. Pilots can game the system such that VC overlaps with trips, but if they do, they eventually run out of VC bank time and simply go unpaid and uncredited.
*Time between promotion was addressed as well - the lockin on a certain type of equipment used to be 12 months, now it is 24 months.
There were a myriad of other work-rule changes and tweaks as well, plus pilots took a 23% paycut (granted that they got 9.4% of it back on 5/1/04 - still, pilots are about 15.8% short of where they were). So, I think most pilots realize that there has been a fundamental change in this business, and as such, that they need to have a fundamental change in their compensation expectations. Being a pilot for a major airline is still a very well-paying (in fact, borderline lucrative) career, just not as much as it was before.