Originally Posted by
PilotFrog
I'm curious, when SONG came around it was flown by Delta seniority list, why when Delta Connection came around were those pilots not Delta seniority pilots?
DCI was around a couple of decades before Song was thought of and really took off from 1999 on with the explosion of small jets which were permitted under our scope language.
There were several historical turning points when it came to outsourcing. Probably the first was when Randy Babbitt, yeah him, was Chair at Eastern Airlines and decided it best to outsource the "B Scale" flying which was resulting in their junior pilots getting paid less than their more senior pilots for the same work. Mr. Babbitt to his credit, has been quoted as saying it was his biggest mistake.
Here at Delta, (name redacted), as MEC, Chair used similar language to describe the flying that ASA and Comair performed as justification for wanting to keep that flying away from the Delta seniority list.
They key to understanding this is, for the last 15 years or so, Delta's union leadership has NOT WANTED this flying to be performed by Delta pilots. The strategy was (and is):
- Set up small jet flying off the property, then
- Limit small jet flying's proliferation through scope clauses
Ours has been a failed strategy. By trading in members' jobs we fail to protect members' jobs. We do not enfoce scope, we
trade it. But this trading has been institutionalized in as much as our leadership does not believe that we could perform small jet flying without an unacceptable cut to our pay and benefits.
If you make a graph of pilot pay versus productivity, you will quickly see the small jet drivers are mostly OVER paid for what they produce & "we" are mostly under paid. IMHO, the senior pilots who control our union have nothing to fear, and everything to gain, by restoring scope.
I do not know how you convince them. When the numbers tell the story, they ignore the numbers ... (names redacted)
In the past several years we've seen a political shift. Certainly the pilots who were trapped at the regionals and those who have stagnated during the decade's outsourcing get the big picture. Reps have at least reversed their public positions ... we will see if anything has changed.