What a sad, pathetic side show.
How do we know YOU aren't using triple reverse super-secret psychology on us?
'cause I'm not that smart. :0
Stop cluttering the board and add to the think tank (if you're equipped to partake in such, that is).
Sure, I'll give you some background: I was on the organizing committee trying to bring ALPA in at my last (regional) job. The company paid a great deal of money to retain the services of Ford and Harrison to try and stop it. It's what they do, and they're
very good at it.
The campaign failed in large part because a contingent of senior pilots, who built their nests very close to management, "came up" with the idea of an in-house "mutual interest committee" (not even a union) which would act as a "voice" to communicate our concerns to management, without all the mess an outside politics of a union. Our issues with scheduling, with pay and benefits, and so on, could be discussed one-on-one, in our little "family," without some outside union interfering.
Several line pilots, some close friends of mine, believed it. They said, "well, let's try this, and if it doesn't work, THEN we'll try and get a union in," having no idea just how much work it was (years) just to get to that point of finally having an election.
Well, enough people bought into the "in-house" idea that we only got 43% of the pilots voting Yes. Almost immediately, the on-time bonus program stopped, the medical insurance (previously free) required employees to pay a good chunk of the premiums, and so on. In 2000 (a couple years before this union vote), the psycales got a $2/hr bump for FOs, and 20
cents per hour bump for second-year-and-up captains -- and that was over
1989 payscales! First-year captain pay has not changed in
eighteen years at that company, and the benefits have gotten more expensive for lesser coverage. (Put another way, the payscale has dropped by 43% over those eighteen years when adjusted for inflation.)
You can see how well the in-house non-union worked for the pilot group.
That's where I'm coming from, and why I called attention to the in-house issue. It's a deliberate distraction designed to fragment the pilot group, and nothing more. It's a technique Ford and Harrison advises, and it's effective if the employee group isn't savvy enough to know better. That's why I'm here: to tell you not to fall for it!