Management has a strategy to further divide us and ratchet us down – they call it “brand management.” We need a counter strategy and we need it yesterday. What I believe we need is brand governance for pilots within the brand. Traditional scope fences will still be necessary outside of the brand, but inside the brand it is going to require a paradigm shift to what I call “the next generation of scope.”
This next generation of scope sets contractual standards for brand eligibility. This scope focuses more on the quality of the contract rather than merely on the quantity of small jet aircraft. To remove management’s financial incentive to develop even more substandard subsets within the brand and accelerate the proverbial race to the bottom – which they think they’ve got right now – all of us need to work on a coordinated brand scope strategy.
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In adjusting our coordinated job security strategy for pilots within a brand, we need not, and indeed must not, waste a single second or one ounce of energy playing the “blame game.”
Let’s just face up to the reality of the brand management thunderstorms in our path and upgrade together to a new course, to a new joint and coordinated job security strategy within a given brand.
Will this be easy? No way!! It will be exceedingly difficult and not just because management will resist it. That’s nothing new, managements resist every thing we do to better protect pilots. What’s going to make this tough is that some of our own pilots are going to resist this effort, at least initially, aren’t they?
And who can blame them? They are out there flying the line, working 16-hour days, away from their families for 2/3 of their lives and still believe they are employed by an airline, not a brand manager. It will be up to us, their elected leadership, to have the courage to tell them the truth, that “somebody moved their cheese,” and it wasn’t other pilots, it was management.
After nearly a quarter of a century of deregulation, we must candidly acknowledge that airline managements have been successful in their propaganda in trying to get pilots to believe that we are all competitors. Their message is: those pilots with different wings and different uniforms – they are the enemy, they are your competition!!
We are not competitors!! Managements must compete!! Not us!!
