Originally Posted by Bucking Bar

FINALLY! Someone writes the correct question!!!!!

George, that is the question we need to ask when engineering scope language. Scope has to be built for disasters, knowing that economic duress will place our contract under stress. Just as buildings codes assume earthquakes, fires, floods and storm.

The much ballyhoo's Contract 2000 included a number of block hour ratio provisions, limits on the operation of DCI aircraft and competing aircraft. People forget that these scope provisions failed nearly immediately after Contract 2000 was in force. I've got to get out some old dusty notes, but I think we gave up what today we would call "production balance" within 60 days of the contract's effective date. Regardless of whether it was 60 days, or 600, we all know what happened; Delta went from 90+% of its departures to somewhere around 40%. I think we can agree that when tested by economic stress, our scope sustained a structural failure.

Next question ... "why'd we do that?"

Pilots need to understand why we outsource. We outsource our flying in the hope Delta will make more money, some portion of which will be paid to us. ALPA partners with management in outsourcing our work (and lets not kid ourselves, the DPA would do the same).

When times get tough, the Company needs more money, desperately. The last thing they'll do is sever their profitable outsourcing strategy. The union's history shows their agreement when the Company is in dire straights. They'll write "better to save all pilots rather than saving a few."

The model then falls into traps of greed and fear. In good times we want more money funded by outsourcing, in bad times we want to avoid the whole outfit going out of business. That is why we now shrink in good times and bad. We are decoupled from the real performance of our airline.

The only long term answer is unity. We must perform our own flying and take the ups and downs with our Company.