You guys still don't get it.

We do not have good scope because those who ran (and run) our union do not want good scope.

Why would ALPA fight to conclude Republic Airlines is a single air carrier after having fought so damn hard to prevent ASA, Comair and Delta from being considered a single air carrier? Same goes with Northwest and their regional carriers, as well as MidWest.

The union's course of conduct is absolutely clear. Some flying is considered undesirable and unable to command the pay and working conditions which meet major airline pilot standards. It is hoped by facilitating management's outsourcing of these undesirable jobs we can somehow profit from the work we do not want (as a union) to perform. We use our scope to define flying we perform, and more importantly, we use our scope to define flying we do not perform.

Outsourcing is a touchy subject for union bosses. Much of what we have in our contract and much of what we do is inconsistent with what our Reps say and write for political consumption by the masses.

The "conflict of interest" mostly exists between junior pilots who care about scope and the senior 767 Captains that run our association who mostly don't care about scope (or worse, see scope in purely economic terms ... selling unity for short term gain). Bottom line is, we did this to ourselves. Folks like me wrote as much as we could, got resolutions passed and made no secret of our concerns, but for the last decade the Delta (and NWA) pilots have continued to ratify these agreements then complain about the results.

ALPA's position on Republic is entirely consistent with ALPA policy and that decision is being made by the very same people who insisted that ASA & Comair were not "Delta" despite having MUCH higher levels of operational integration than Frontier and the other Republic subsidiaries.

Deadhead asks, "where is the unity in that?" It is an excellent question. I've asked my Reps to use that question as a litmus test for every decision they make. If they would apply that simple, clear, rule to the administration of a union we could avoid a lot of pain and career harm to ALPA members.