National ALPA Skywest=SCABS

[JoeMerchant]

Wrong! Skywest is taking a couple of planes right now, two 700s. Delta and SKYW Inc decide where the planes go, while pilots fly them. ALPA has no control over that. If that were true, beings ASA is cheaper on the 200s, SKYW would transfer all the 200s to ASA right?

VOTED IN FAVOR!

ASARJMan,
If ALPA "has no control" over where planes go, why do we have a section 1 "Recognition and Scope" in all ALPA contracts? Either we DO have control, or we are waisting our time with scope - which is it RJMan?

 

[ohplease!]

I think Firehoser's argument is that what would stop Delta using other DCA carriers and reflowing their flying through ATL? Isn't that what happened when Comair went on strike?

I think they did more rerouting PAX away from CVG. I know several ASA crews refused to fly trips that were believed to be "struck" work and were NOT forced to fly them. Not sure if they would handle it that way the nect time around. No way to know if the freedom/comair/shuttle/chitaqua crews would refuse to fly routes that were "struck".

 

[Morning Wood]

It is a valid point to note. Why should pilots from a nonunionized carrier have the benifit of acquiring jobs at a unionized carrier like FedEx or Continental? By all means if you want to work for Skywest for your entire career and knock on unions than please feel free to do so. However, if you want to move on then explain to me why you should be permitted to acquire jobs at another unionized carrier?

.

That is the same mentality of having to have a union card to go pound nails on a job site in Missouri. Maybe the person(s) you refer to came to work when a union drive wasn't in the works and never voted one way or another. Why shouldn't they get hired by a union carrier down the road? Do you think People aspire to be union members and then take whatever job they can do be in one? Maybe they should get an IBEW card and then they would be worthy of being hired by a union carrier.

As far as being scabs you guys at skywest are not there yet. Coming close with a single payrate is almost worse than flying struck work or taking someone else's a/c. When Skywest management asks you to crew an ASA plane and route you have to ask yourself one question, "Well, I am going to be labeled a scab puke the rest of my miserable existence if I do this?" The answer is yes you will be. This is a small industry and believe me when I say Skywest will not always be in buisness either, especially if ASA does strike or walkout.

If SkyWest owns ASA and therefore the airplanes, then who do the airplanes
really belong to? The routes you claim to own aren’t yours either. They’re Delta’s
and ASA has benefited as much as any other regional from flying routes that
Mother Delta doesn’t operate anymore. Guess that makes you a scab too by your
definition since not only are you flying Delta's routes, but also SkyWest's routes out of SLC.

 

[HelloNewman]

Actually hiring pilots from non union carriers makes more sense for the company. They are more likely to do the right thing.

 

[Tomct]

TOMCT,

You might want to read Wing's post about cancellations and aircraft transfers, it appears that 703 has been transferred.

Guess the CP was blowing smoke, or doesn't know squat.

And Yet....you sound so happy! What a tool! Wooo Hooo, we are keeping the regional industry pay in the dirt.....wooooo hoooo!!!

 

[Tomct]

If SkyWest owns ASA and therefore the airplanes, then who do the airplanes
really belong to? The routes you claim to own aren’t yours either. They’re Delta’s
and ASA has benefited as much as any other regional from flying routes that
Mother Delta doesn’t operate anymore. Guess that makes you a scab too by your
definition since not only are you flying Delta's routes, but also SkyWest's routes out of SLC. [/quote]


Yeah Wood....put it back in the silo! The routes we have been flying for Delta were chosen because their bigger aircraft could not make money on those routes! Once it gets to big for us, they take it back and we start another city! Most of the time we fly them just too keep them for Delta's Heavy season....if they stop flying the route, they Lose it!
The only way that it would be considered flying struck work is if the Delta pilots went on strike and we continued to fly that route in their place! Not what is happening here....Although you might not be able to say that when we walk and JA tries to put his pilots in there to fly our routes! That is STRUCK WORK!!!

 

[ArcticFlier]

Moreover, there captains are making almost 89k, that isn't bad for an RJ.

Dang. I guess I took a pay cut.



AF

 

[SSDD]

And Yet....you sound so happy! What a tool! Wooo Hooo, we are keeping the regional industry pay in the dirt.....wooooo hoooo!!!

No, it doesn't bother me one way or the other, but its people like you who pretend to have all the answers, when you don't really know crap, then when you get caught you go right to name calling.

You need to grow up.

 

[Firehoser]

Slightly above and bankruptcy

We're not asking for industry-leading rates. However we would like to see payrates slightly above currently successful airlines like CHQ, XJT, and SKW. I don't think 1-2% above that is going to make us that much less competitive.

While I'm sure this would be the wet dream of about 30-50% of the SkyWest pilots (cool, instant upgrade thanks to those greedy ASA pilots!), I think you drastically underestimate how slowly the Chapter 7 process goes. Everything must go through the courts, and even if it took 3 months to get it finalized, that's 3 months of struck work that can't be flown. That would be enough to bankrupt SkyWest and kill Delta.

"slightly above" is irrelevant in the bigger picture. "Slightly above", "even with", or "below" Skywest wages is irrelevant if they are not competitive in the broader market. And besides, compensation is much more than pay rates - work rules, benefits, and even the commuter clause costs the company money (The commuter clause forces the company to hire more pilots to cover those commuters who exercise the clause ) Theseand other factors are all part of the calculation of "labor costs". Thats why so many pilots have the mistaken impression (based on hourly pay rates alone vs. other direct operating costs) that anyone arguing that labor is the second highest cost center behind fuel is lying through their teeth.

On the other hand, Skywest pilots, flying across seat ranges and flying for one single pay rate are more productive than ASA pilots and require somewhat lower total staffing levels - in summary Skywest pilots overall compensation, when these factors are considered, is most likely at an overall lower compensation level. Its one reason why Skywest is in the big picture generally competitive for new business.

As to the bankruptcy, lets assume that I want to start an airline - lets call it Wham-o Airlines. I can incorporate, build a training curriculum, acquire aircraft, hire and train pilots and even conduct proving runs under Part 91 before I get an Air Carrier Certificate. Not until I receive the Air Carrier Certificate from the FAA am I a Part 121 carrier and legally able to conduct scheduled operations.


Now, 20 years later, my company has be acquired by a holding company, who owns the gates and the hulls, and my pilots are about to go on strike. The BOD makes a determination that over a 10 year period, its more cost efficient to eat their initial investment in Wham-o, liquidate the company, and then transfer the assets to a sister company. All they have to do is turn in their Air Carrier Certificate! At that point the FAA no longer considers them to exist as a Part 121 carrier - their work is no longer struck work.

The company that is left is simply a corporation of capital assets awaiting final disposition via bankruptcy proceedings. Thus as far as ASA's flying being struck work, that can be taken care of expeditiously by simply returning the Air Carrier Certificate to the FAA, enabling Delta immediately to at least partially cover the flying with other carriers. A good case can be made that any ALPA crews refusing to fly the routes after the Certificate has been returned can be sued in court for engaging in illegal job actions.

 

[BigLebowski]

You don't "own" squat.
The parent company of SkyWest Airlines owns ASA.
The two airlines are simply two subsidiaries of the same company. Some back office operations are combined at SGU while operations are controlled separately.

Hopefully that helps you overcome your ignorance.

Ok...but this parent company didn't exist until SkyWest bought ASA. So....help me clarify that one please.

 

[BigLebowski]

You own nothing. You feel good about yourself now because your chances for upgrade and progression have been improved due to the fact we are losing aiplanes and jobs at ASA. I can tell you now that ASA pilots and the Association wouldn't allow it if the situation were reversed. Thats the difference between you and me. Feel good about it if you must.

ALPA wouldn't allow it if it was reversed??? I believe you are wrong. Have you ever heard of Trans States Airlines and G0Jet??? What did ALPA do there...nothing, exactly what they are doing for you.
BTW I dont' feel good about myself about progression here at SkyW...I chose this airline because I didnt' want a union, and they are a good company. People are happy here, unlike everybody at the regionals represented by beloved ALPA.

 

[thebest]

If alpa is so great, why are asa folks so Pi$sed..........

 

[Eric]

If ALPA is so great, why does Mesa exist in its current form?

 

[Tomct]

No, it doesn't bother me one way or the other, but its people like you who pretend to have all the answers, when you don't really know crap, then when you get caught you go right to name calling.

You need to grow up.

And just WHERE was the name calling in this statement? Yeah, that's what I thought...SHUT IT!!

 

[thebest]

If SkyWest owns ASA and therefore the airplanes, then who do the airplanes
really belong to? The routes you claim to own aren’t yours either. They’re Delta’s
and ASA has benefited as much as any other regional from flying routes that
Mother Delta doesn’t operate anymore. Guess that makes you a scab too by your
definition since not only are you flying Delta's routes, but also SkyWest's routes out of SLC.

Yeah Wood....put it back in the silo! The routes we have been flying for Delta were chosen because their bigger aircraft could not make money on those routes! Once it gets to big for us, they take it back and we start another city! Most of the time we fly them just too keep them for Delta's Heavy season....if they stop flying the route, they Lose it!
The only way that it would be considered flying struck work is if the Delta pilots went on strike and we continued to fly that route in their place! Not what is happening here....Although you might not be able to say that when we walk and JA tries to put his pilots in there to fly our routes! That is STRUCK WORK!!![/quote]
ASA has apla, everything will be fine!

 

[Rez O. Lewshun]

Firehoser-

I read your posts. Excellent job in pointing out the problem....

What solutions do you offer?

 

[Rez O. Lewshun]

The War on Wages:

Air Line Pilots: Corp America and our management do not see a difference between a Wal Mart worker and a pilot. They are both commidity costs that need to be controlled. See the last paragraph

Should we be cheering over the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has finally set a new record? No. The Dow is doing well largely because American employers are waging a successful war against wages. Economic growth since early 2000, when the Dow reached its previous peak, hasn’t been exceptional. But after-tax corporate profits have more than doubled, because workers’ productivity is up, but their wages aren’t — and because companies have dealt with rising health insurance premiums by denying insurance to ever more workers.
If you want to see how the war against wages is being fought, and what it’s doing to working Americans and their families, consider the latest news from Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart already has a well-deserved reputation for paying low wages and offering few benefits to its employees; last year, an internal Wal-Mart memo conceded that 46 percent of its workers’ children were either on Medicaid or lacked health insurance. Nonetheless, the memo expressed concern that wages and benefits were rising, in part “because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases.”
The problem from the company’s point of view, then, is that its workers are too loyal; it wants cheap labor that doesn’t hang around too long, but not enough workers quit before acquiring the right to higher wages and benefits. Among the policy changes the memo suggested to deal with this problem was a shift to hiring more part-time workers, which “will lower Wal-Mart’s health care enrollment.”
And the strategy is being put into effect. “Investment analysts and store managers,” reports The New York Times, “say Wal-Mart executives have told them the company wants to transform its work force to 40 percent part-time from 20 percent.” Another leaked Wal-Mart memo describes a plan to impose wage caps, so that long-term employees won’t get raises. And the company is taking other steps to keep workers from staying too long: in some stores, according to workers, “managers have suddenly barred older employees with back or leg problems from sitting on stools.”
It’s a brutal strategy. Once upon a time a company that treated its workers this badly would have made itself a prime target for union organizers. But Wal-Mart doesn’t have to worry about that, because it knows that these days the people who are supposed to enforce labor laws are on the side of the employers, not the workers.
​

Since 1935, U.S. workers considering whether to join a union have been protected by the National Labor Relations Act, which bars employers from firing workers for engaging in union activities. For a long time the law was effective: workers were reasonably well protected against employer intimidation, and the union movement flourished.
In the 1970’s, however, employers began a successful campaign to roll back unions. This campaign depended on routine violation of labor law: experts estimate that by 1980 employers were illegally firing at least one out of every 20 workers who voted for a union. But employers rarely faced serious consequences for their lawbreaking, thanks to America’s political shift to the right. And now that the shift to the right has gone even further, political appointees are seeking to remove whatever protection for workers’ rights that the labor relations law still provides.

The Republican majority on the National Labor Relations Board, which is responsible for enforcing the law, has just declared that millions of workers who thought they had the right to join unions don’t. You see, the act grants that right only to workers who aren’t supervisors. And the board, ruling on a case involving nurses, has declared that millions of workers who occasionally give other workers instructions can now be considered supervisors.

As the dissent from the Democrats on the board makes clear, the majority bent over backward, violating the spirit of the law, to reduce workers’ bargaining power.
So what’s keeping paychecks down? Major employers like Wal-Mart have decided that their interests are best served by treating workers as a disposable commodity, paid as little as possible and encouraged to leave after a year or two. And these employers don’t worry that angry workers will respond to their war on wages by forming unions, because they know that government officials, who are supposed to protect workers’ rights, will do everything they can to come down on the side of the wage-cutters.
​

 

[Firehoser]

Solutions? Im not a magician

Firehoser-

I read your posts. Excellent job in pointing out the problem....

What solutions do you offer?

As I see it two things are going to have to happen to change the paradigm anytime soon and pilot unions will have little or no part of it. First, view this presentation by MIT on airline profit cycles to verify my points.

http://web.mit.edu/airlines/www/board-meetings/meeting-nov-2004/ProfitCycles-Jiang.pdf

First notice the average profit margins over the last twenty years - they average about 5%. This is equivalent to having only $250 dollars left over each month from a $5000 take home pay. When you are in this extreme financial condition ANY loss of business can transform your figures from black to red. Thus the difficulty of the major airlines to raise prices: If one doesn't go along and the others see even 2% of their ridership moving to other airlines, the loss is critical - it probably is equivalent to all of the profit they are making.

Labor, blithely negotiating ever higher compensation packages - even at modest increases will eat up this narrow profit margin - eventually experiencing the cycles I illustrated all over again. Thus something has to happen to improve pricing leverage on one end and thus profitability, or to change the dynamics of supply and demand in terms of pilots at the other end.

Capacity has to be reduced in the system in order to let the market forces of supply and demand allow ticket price increases. That will only occur in the near future when a major airline is liquidated - some analysts are forecasting this very thing as the next down cycle will be very huge as you can see from the MIT presentation. Ironically, it will likely to be labor costs that will put that airline under as I don't see (from the posts on these boards) either ALPA National nor the rank and file pilots understanding market forces well enough to understand whether their labor policies will be sustainable. History suggests that it will repeat itself and the pilots at one carrier will unfortunately gamble and lose. It seems we don't learn from history.

The other end of the equation is the pilot supply side. Already we are seeing some reduction in supply in real terms - one would think that this would drive salaries up and it will likely do so eventually. However, major airlines don't care about the ability of their regional partners to attract quality pilots and therefore will not be willing to pay the fees necessary for the regionals to attract those pilots with increased pay.

Thus it is entirely possible that those regionals who agree to compensation increases in order to attract pilots will ultimately lose in the competition for major airline flying as they face either bankruptcy or the dropping of flying due to the requirement to demand higher fees (see Express Jet)- Catch 22.

So the only idea I have at this moment is to assist the company to be more efficient, more cost conscious, and deliver more customer service. This will gain market share at lower cost figures, thus increasing profitability thus making more money available for compensation increases. Profit sharing is a great incentive to do this and allows the company to "increase or shrink" total compensation as market forces dictate.

The real question is: Will labor (ne: individual rank and file pilots) make the effort to understand the market forces in play and understand how their negotiation desires "fit" within those market forces in terms of sustainabilty? Judging from (not the ignorance displayed in these forums but...) the unwilligness of many pilots to educate themselves on these issues and thus reduce their ignorance, I am not optimistic. It is almost if many pilots are frightened that if they educate themselves in these areas, their cherished beliefs, germinated, husbanded, and sustained by their single source of information , will be undermined.

Until individual rank and file pilots do so, they will continue to allow themselves to be manipulated by both union and management alike. They will continue to operate and make decisions in ignorance, either losing what they could have won in negotiations or ultimately pricing themselves out of the market.

 

[007]

Firehoser=Another guy wanting to work for less.

 

[007]

Non-union pilots are more likely to do the right thing!!!!!

Maybe, kind of a broad statment though, even if so, it's only because you're afraid of being suspended without pay. Go to room and think about what you did.