Originally Posted by Fear_of_Flying
Why is a union not a viable option anymore?
Why is a union not a viable option anymore?
To start with the top tier paying flying pilot jobs have been halved.
The Regional jobs have doubled.
One of the biggest and most critical mistakes made by ALPA was chosing to ignore this segment of aircraft operations and pilots initially. Now the numbers are against them. Many of these operations were allowed to be non-union for a long period thus the pilot groups were not brought up with strong union loyalties (and as much as I hate to say it rightly so). So now you have operations like the social experiment JET BLUE which act like they have an entitlement to everything a Union Pilot has sacrificed for.
Then there was the infamous and little spoken about AA strike during the Clinton era (if I remember correctly--might have been Bush) where they were ordered by the President back to work 1 minute into a strike. This one act took the power away from all airline Unions. You'll never see another nationwide strike by a pilot group--the precedent has been set. You now have the Federal Govt. protecting an entity over the people.
So the "fix" is a thing called arbitration which the union is woefully inadequate to deal with because the arbitrator typically comes from outside the commercial aviation industry and does not understand the nuances of the pilot group contracts.
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