Lay off on the Skywest guys. They have no more control over their fleet plans and hiring than we do. Like us they are just bumping along and hoping for the best. As far as ALPA is concerned IMHO, they are great safety advocates, they keep management honest, and they have neat stickers. ALPA has not been the promised land and I would not hesitate to move to a good company just because they were non ALPA. I cite the following reasons.
1) I have seen ALPA settle grievances with no regard to the claimant. They tend to trade off things during the grievance process that generally has no benefit to the claimant.
2) When the CDO days off grievance was lost I threw my hands up in the air. The language was so plain and simple yet we lost.
3) There is a small army of ALPA officers getting paid time off with no appreciable movement and no meetings scheduled. However, thanks for the free family nights, those pilots that live in Atlanta, and have the time off and do not have other committments really enjoy them.
4) One ALPA officer slanders another ALPA officer over and over and over. This shows that all is not cherry in the corporate offices of ALPA.
5) An ALPA officer said point plank numerous times that Skywest could not transfer airplanes while we were in negotiations. Wrong, and where is ALPA now?
6) ALPA continually talks about "struck work" yet we flew Comair airplanes when Comair was on strike. I remember all of the posturing during that time. "Technically these are not Comair airplanes", "The Comair MEC is cool with this", "We are waiting on ALPA National to issue a ruling", "Fly and then call your Rep", etc. etc.
This is just a small list of my frustrations. There are more. That being said, ALPA is the horse I am ridding and I plan to stay on it for the entire ride. My point is only to lay off the Skywest dudes. They are doing the best they can with what they have to work with. Their results are no worse than ours.