Jeff, thanks for posting what I was too lazy too! That pretty much sums up the union situation at Lakes. Once Harrington and Liggett left, things started sliding bigtime. The biggest problem I saw, and still see was weak communication. The hotline never got updated, all the newsletters were out of date, and I never could figure out how whoever was running the union got to their position. I don't remember any elections. Without communication, things fall apart quickly. The only way to get info is if you happen to be in the release room when somebody "in the know" is around. As for Trychler, I lost all respect for that guy after listening to him at a meeting prior to opening up the contract negotiations. He didn't seem to have a clue about what market rates for 19 and 30 seat turboprop pilots were. They seemed to pulling proposed payrates out of the air. I suggested a year 1 captain pay rate that shocked him, until I told him it was 5% greater than CoEx's payrate for the same aircraft from a 3yr old contract. It also bugged me when he made a tough speech about how he wanted to get the schedules written the way the contract specifies(85-95 hours), but seemed opposed to stricter language and penalties to achieve this. His reason was that he didn't want to penalize the people that wanted to fly 120 a month. You can't do both. He also said that we would be recieving stickers for our flight bags supporting our contract fight about 2 weeks after that meeting. It's been over a year and half, anyone have one yet? That stuff aside, you are correct that the union is only strong as its membership. People have to get involved and people have to fly the current contract not just give lip service to it. Without that, no union will help. The biggest problem with Teamsters seems to be that they don't devote enough of their national resources and time to their airline division. TI heard that they don't even have enough money to go to court on the 9/11 grievances. That's where ALPA could help, all they do is airlines and they have a greater wealth of info. Sure they may not come running to help a small airline like Lakes, but membership will get you access to the library of info. It'll probably be up to some ambitious soul in the membership to take it upon themselves to dig out the relevant info, but it's better than the current situation. I understand that many regional carriers are dissapointed with ALPA and I can see why, it's just that Lakes hasn't even caught up to those carriers old contracts let alone have the luxury to complain about what they do. Step one is getting invloved, followed by better communication, flying the contract, and then you can talk about switching representation and ramifications therof.
