Question for the professional negotiator fans. Do you feel that this is a really well thought out idea? To me it seems to be more of one borne of general frustration with the nator of the RLA, the union politics of the day, and for some a philosophical dislike of being in an union and what that requires to get a contract done. JMO, but when I look at the idea of professional negotiators I wonder who these people might be. A simple google of terms like aviation labor lawyers/negotiators or labor negotiators pretty much brings a bunch of firms specializing in negotiation from the management side of things, aviation accident law, or workplace claims for individuals. That's not particularly surprising as those areas are where the majority of the business is in our sector. This is an example of one of the webpages from one law firm: Fisher & Phillips LLP - Solutions at Work - Labor Relations . So a little flash cash every few years or so from us pilots is going to get guys like this on our side? Also it occurs to me that it is highly likely that there's a good chance that many of the best of these guys have not only worked at other airlines against employees, but possibly even our company. FDX is a big company with a lot of arms, and several law firms work both sides of the aisle on such issues. It wouldn't surprise me if FDX did something along the lines of what gderek said and maybe hired out to a local firm in say Portland to handle something like workman's comp claims against the company. How is that everyday business going to play out when we ask the same firm to negotiate against the same company every four years?

This seems like a relatively small subsection of the legal profession, and it seems likely that the best attorneys that haven't aligned themselves with ALPA (national), Teamsters, APA, SWAPA, etc have aligned themselves with the companies themselves. In fact we often see word that ALPA has loaned out their services to other unions for various things. If we aren't going to be using any of those attorneys for negotiations, we're going to be fishing from the other pond and I find it hard to feel comfortable with those guys on our side of the table. We've had parking lot deals and the current MC is being accused of unilateral negotiation actions, but we're to believe that lawyers that do deals for a living are going to be stopped from ex part comm because we have a pilot rep in there? Especially when we're possibly talking about firms that either have or had a prior relationship with the company in what is a small world. Take a look at some of the so-called outside consultants ALPA and others have hired over the years to do 'independent analysis' of things usually in concessionary contract negotiations. Peel back the layers and you often find things like the firm having prior relationships with the company in question, getting part or all of their fee paid by the company not the union if a deal is reached, and getting the bulk of their 'independent' analysis data from the company itself.

I read a comment earlier from someone saying that they don't care what happened at airline XYZ, but you should lest it happen to you to, and it's not hard to see where this idea could go wrong. All that said, I expect the general response to be a grumpy 'we can't do any worse than what we have now,' so why did I type this!! Party on, Garth.