Cav,
Many in the NJI employee group understand completely that the vast majority of 1108 members are hard working professionals who only want a merger to prevent potential whipsawing and to hold someone to a verbal promise he reportedly made (gee, don't you wish you could hold every employer, politician, and spouse in your life to every promise they've made?). In fact, some NJI people don't necessarily feel a pilot integration would be a bad thing.
What causes concern are the demands of the hard liners that in a merger the NJI pilots be stapled to the bottom, or that NJA take just the planes and not the pilots, or dismantle the Hilton Head operation, or any number of other vindictive, thuggish statements.
If the primary argument for single carrier has always been that NJA and NJI work for the same company and fly the same clients, then any post-merger seniority integration should be conducted on a straight date of hire basis. We all know that WON'T happen so what's the ratio? 3 to 1? 5 to 1? 10 to 1? 0?
During the contract negotiations, we kept hearing about "fairness." Apparently it goes out the window pretty quick when dealing with a different group.
As for dismantling the Hilton Head operation and "taking it back to its rightful place in CMH," nearly everyone at NJI who also worked with CMH operations will tell you that HHX is a way better deal. The schedulers do their jobs as efficiently as the system will let them, they actually listen to crew suggestions, they don't schedule vindictively, they don't solicit or accept gifts, and with one phone call you can coordinate scheduling, dispatch, Jeppeson, maintenance and management. I watched an Ultra crew last week land short of the destination because of fuel issues and take 45 minutes to get back in the air because they had to make 10 different phone calls and tell the same story 10 times before the CMH gears could grind out a new release. An NJI crew with the same issue could be airborne in 15 minutes with 1 phone call. If a merger does happen, the operations centers should remain separate because of huge differences in international trip planning and execution.
As the next three years grind on, I don't expect any blockbuster annoucements that will shock anybody or suddenly shift the balance of power. As long as the cooler heads on both sides prevail, I'm guessing it will be more of an evolution of thought that will one day make the best solution fairly evident.